Police here today charged that an Israeli Government employee no longer in this country was involved in the slaying here of Herbert Cukurs, a former Nazi war criminals who took part in the killing of Jews in Latvia during the Second World War. The suspect was earlier identified by the police as a “diplomat” Israeli sources were quoted as saying that he had an official but not a diplomatic passport.
An autopsy here today disclosed that Cukurs, who was accused at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials of having killed 30,000 Latvian Jews in 1941, was killed on February 24 by repeated blows on the head. Police called the killing an “act of Jewish vengence.”
(In Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Cukurs was living when he arrived in Montevideo last month on a business trip, Gunnar Cukurs, son of the slain former Nazi, said today that Soviet agents might have been involved in the killing, since the dead man has been sought by the Russians because of his wartime activities against Communists in Latvia.)
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