Germans jail 86-year-old man suspected in Nazi massacres

BERLIN - German authorities said Monday that they have arrested an 86-year-old man who allegedly led a Nazi-backed unit involved in the World War II massacres of civilians in Slovakia and the capture of U.S. and British intelligence agents, as well as an American journalist.

Ladislav Niznansky could be charged with 164 counts of murder relating to killings of civilians in three Slovak villages in early 1945, Munich prosecutors said. If charged, he could become one of the last Nazi-era suspects to be tried in Germany.

Niznansky, arrested Friday at his Munich home, is accused of having headed the Slovak section of a Nazi unit that hunted resistance fighters after the Germans crushed an uprising against Slovakia's Nazi puppet regime in 1944.

Niznansky fled to Germany after a 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia. He worked for several decades at Radio Free Europe, a U.S.-financed station that broadcast to the East Bloc from Munich during the Cold War.

In 1962, a Czechoslovak court convicted Niznansky, now a German citizen, of the village killings and sentenced him to death in his absence. He retired from Radio Free Europe in 1983, station spokeswoman Sonia Winter said.

He is being investigated in the killings of 146 people in Ostry Grun and Klak in central Slovakia in January 1945 and the shooting of 18 Jews at Ksina the next month, prosecutors said in a statement. Most of the victims were women and children.

Niznansky is also believed to have led the capture of a group of U.S. and British agents on a top-secret mission to assist the 1944 Slovakian revolt. With the group was Associated Press war correspondent Joseph Morton. He and about a dozen Americans and Britons were captured Dec. 26, 1944, and executed Jan. 24, 1945.

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