Germany's chief Nazi war crimes investigator said yesterday he had asked prosecutors to extradite John Demjanjuk from the United States and charge him with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews in a death camp.

The investigator, Kurt Schrimm, said his office had evidence that Demjanjuk, 88, had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland and had personally led Jews to the gas chambers there in 1943. "We have managed to obtain hundred of documents and have also found a number of witnesses who spoke out against Demjanjuk," Schrimm said.

"For the first time we have even found lists of names of the people who Demjanjuk personally led into the gas chambers. We have no doubt that he is responsible for the death of over 29,000 Jews."

Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, now living in Ohio, is on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of the top 10 Second World War criminals.

He denies any involvement in war crimes. He said he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war in 1942. He emigrated to the United States in the 1950s.

Stripped of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka death camp, he was first extradited to Israel in 1986.

He was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as a guard at Treblinka. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably the notorious "Ivan" at Treblinka.

[W.Z. Pimping for the Holocaust Industry via Reuters, Josie Cox does not mention that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) perpetrated "fraud on the court" to revoke Mr. Demjanjuk's citizenship and to extradite him to Israel.]

He returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and the United States restored his citizenship in 1998.