Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld has returned safely to Paris, after being expelled from Syria, where she went last week to protest the haven given Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner and the denial of emigration rights to Syrian Jews.
Although she was confined to her hotel room under house arrest after demonstrating Saturday outside the Interior Ministry in Damascus, Klarsfeld believes her mission was not in vain.
Its purpose was to force French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas to raise the issue of Brunner during his official visit to Syrian on Dec. 19, she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Brunner, who commanded the Drancy detention center near Paris, where French Jews were herded for deportation to Auschwitz, is one of the few major Nazi war criminals still at large.
Sentenced in absentia to death for mass murder, he has lived for the past 30 years under an alias in a villa in Damascus.
But on Oct. 15 he disappeared from those premises. The Syrian authorities, who consistently have denied that Brunner ever lived there, are reportedly trying to ease him out of the country.
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