Five years after a three-judge panel sentenced John Demjanjuk to death for war crimes committed at the Treblinka death camp, Israel’s highest court is finally ready to issue a ruling on his appeal.
The court’s opinion, consisting of hundreds of pages of legal reasoning, will be announced at 9 a.m. on Thursday, July 29.
The decision, which was the product of extensive consultations among the five justices who heard the case, will be broadcast live on radio and television here.
The long-awaited ruling was originally expected to be announced this week. But according to the Israeli daily Hadashot, a strike by government workers delayed the printing of the booklength legal opinion.
Demjanjuk was condemned to death by a three-judge panel of the Jerusalem District Court in April 1988, after being extradited from the United States.
He was found guilty of direct involvement in the deaths of some 800,000 inmates at Treblinka.
Several inmates who survived identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” but his defense, both in the trial and on appeal, is that he is the victim of mistaken identity.
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