Marking the fourth unsuccessful bid to convict a Canadian for wartime atrocities, an Ontario court has dropped charges against an alleged Nazi war criminal because of his failing health.
Radislav Grujicic, an 83-year-old retired bookseller, had a leg amputated in August after gangrene set in following complications from diabetes. He is reportedly not lucid and is unfit to stand trial.
Though technically the charges against the Windsor, Ontario, man could be reactivated within a year, it is unlikely that will occur, according to Ivan Whitehall, the Justice Department’s most senior prosecutor, who had been assigned to the case.
Grujicic, 83, was charged in December 1992 with 10 counts of premeditated murder and one count each of conspiracy to murder and kidnap.
His indictment stated that as a senior official of a special section of the Belgrade police in wartime Serbia from June 22, 1941, to Oct. 1, 1944, he conspired with civil authorities and the German occupying forces in the arrest and interrogation of suspected Communists.
As a result of his activities, his victims were deported to Nazi Germany and elsewhere for forced labor. Also resulting from his activities, 10 people are alleged to have been shot in Belgrade on May 25, 1943.
Grujicic reportedly was employed by the CIA and for a very short time by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for whom he used his intelligence skills to ferret out Communists among Yugoslav immigrants to the United States and Canada.
Sol Littman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Canadian office commended the Justice Department for dropping the case against the terminally ill man.
In a statement, Littman, who had first brought Grujicic to the attention of Canadian authorities in 1985, reiterated his earlier opposition to the trial.
“No matter how eager we are to see war criminals punished, our own sense of justice militates against subjection of a man who may be near death to the rigors of a trial,” he wrote.
Grujicic was the fourth man tried in Canada for Nazi war crimes since the country’s Criminal Code was amended in 1987 to allow for the prosecution of war crimes committed outside Canadian jurisdiction against non-Canadians.
None have been successfully prosecuted.
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