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Canada Bars War Criminal from His Former Homeland

April 4, 1995
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A convicted Nazi war criminal released from prison in the netherlands will not be allowed back into Canada, Immigration officials here have said.

Jacob Luitjens, 75, was freed from prison last week after serving 28 months of a life sentence for “aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war.”

A former botany instructor at the University of british Columbia, in Vancouver, Luitjens was extradited to the Netherlands in 1992 after years of legal wrangling in the absence of any extradition treaty between the two countries.

He had been tried in 1948 in the Netherlands in absentia.

During World War II, Luitjens was a member of the Dutch Nazi Party and they paramilitary unit that assisted the Gestapo in rounding up Jews and resistance fighters in occupied Holland.

He has applied to the Canadian government to return to Vancouver, where his wife lives, said Wiebe Alkema, Dutch Justice Ministry spokesman.

He also could reapply to immigrate or seek a special ministerial permit.

Neither attempt would be fruitful, however, officials maintained.

“He is inadmissible on the basis of war crimes,” said Pam Cullum of the Canada Immigration Department.

He was stripped of his Canadian citizenship in 1991 for having concealed his Nazi ties when he emigrated from Paraguay in 1961 to Canada.

He also concealed his past when he applied for citizenship a decade later.

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