Dr. Horst Schumann, 60, a former Nazi death camp physician fighting extradition to West Germany to face a war crimes trial, lost a petition yesterday for release from prison.
The Ghana high court rejected the Nazi doctor’s bid for a writ of habeas corpus to be released from the jail where he has been kept since lower courts ruled he should be extradited to West Germany. The rejection sustained a magistrate court’s ruling in August that Dr. Schumann should be returned to West Germany.
The Nazi physician, whose wartime experiments reportedly resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 victims, most of them Jews, was expected to appeal the high court ruling.
The West German Government has long been seeking the extradition from Ghana of Dr. Schumann as a major Nazi war criminal charged with mass-killing of Jews and other inmates of Nazi camps. He will be put on trial in Germany as soon as he is delivered to the German authorities.
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