Reports: Most-wanted Nazi died in Cairo in 1992

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-05 09:36

CAIRO -- Documents have surfaced in Egypt showing the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim, died in Cairo in 1992, Germany's ZDF television and The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The report said Heim was living under a pseudonym and had converted to Islam by the time of his death from intestinal cancer.

ZDF said that in a joint effort with the New York Times, it located a passport, application for a residence permit, bank slips, personal letters and medical papers -- in all more than 100 documents-- left behind by Heim in a briefcase in the hotel room where he lived under the name Tarek Hussein Farid.

Though he did not know Heim's real identity, Egyptian dentist Tarek Abdelmoneim el Rifai said he knew him through his father, Abdelmoneim el Rifai, 88, who was Heim's dentist in Cairo.

He told the AP on Wednesday that he only met Heim a few times, 20 years ago, but confirmed that he knew of his death.

"He died in 1992. I didn't know that he was a doctor and that he is the most wanted Nazi war criminal. I am surprised," he said in a telephone interview.

"He introduced himself to my father as a German and I know that he converted to Islam and changed his name."

When he met Heim two decades ago at his father's clinic, el Rifai said he had the impression he was on the run.

"The only thing I knew about him is that he fled from the Jews," el Rifai said.

ZDF quoted Heim's son Ruediger Heim as confirming the pseudonym Tarek Hussein Farid as his father's assumed name and the documents as belonging to him. Heim said he visited his father regularly in Cairo and had taken care of him after an operation related to his cancer in 1990.

Simon Wiesenthal Center head Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said he has not seen the documents and that while it seems that there is "definitely a strong possibility" they point to Heim's death in Cairo 16 years ago, they need to be examined by experts.

If it turns out to be true, however, he said that "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms of prosecuting people who helped Aribert Heim escape justice."

He pointed out that Ruediger Heim has previously said that the only contact he had since his father went into hiding in 1962 were two notes that appeared in his family's mailbox, and that he had no idea if he was alive or dead.

"Ruediger has been lying," Zuroff told The Associated Press in an interview from Jerusalem. "Either he is lying now or he was lying before, and he has a vested interest in this so anything he says has to be taken with a certain amount of skepticism and suspicion -- and the most important thing is missing: the body. There's no grave, there's no corpse, there's no DNA tests."

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