Court Rejects U.S. Bid to Oust Accused War Criminal

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a long-running government attempt to deport accused war criminal Edgars Laipenieks, who worked for Nazi occupation forces in Latvia during World War II.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 that Justice Department officials had failed to prove allegations that Laipenieks, 71, persecuted Jews and political prisoners at the infamous Riga Central Prison in Latvia.

“In sum, we find insufficient evidence to support the . . . determination that the government established by clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence that Laipenieks assisted or participated in the persecution of persons because of their political beliefs,” concluded the majority opinion written by Judge Thomas Tang.

“While we certainly do not condone the treatment that prisoners apparently received at the (Riga) prison, we do not find Laipenieks’ admission (that he occasionally struck prisoners) sufficient to support deportability,” Tang wrote.

Bob Mandgie, assistant district director of detention and deportation for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Diego, said that he had not seen the court’s opinion but added that he expects an appeal by the Justice Department.

“They’ll probably take it to the Supreme Court,” he said. “If they’ve gone this far on it, they’ll probably go all the way.”

Denied War Crimes

Laipenieks, reached at his home in La Jolla, denied, as he has in the past, any war crimes.

“They said I was responsible for killing 60,000 Jews,” he said. “My God, I never had anything to do with the Jews. I was in the Latvian Political Police, like the FBI or CIA, tracing Russian and communist killers. That was my only job.”

He said he is employed today as a security guard, living in a trailer on a construction site in La Jolla.

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in June, 1981, sued to have Laipenieks expelled from the country, claiming he had concealed his role as head jailer at the Riga prison during World War II. Witnesses who testified in 1982 at a deportation hearing in San Diego said Laipenieks was responsible for ordering the execution there of at least 200 prisoners from 1941 to 1943.

Former prisoners and people still living in Latvia, which is now part of the Soviet Union, were among those who testified in person and via videotape recordings during the hearing.

Laipenieks admitted during the hearing that he “roughed up” a few communist prisoners after being recruited by the Nazis but denied seriously hurting or killing anyone.

A federal law provides for deportation of aliens who took part in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin or political opinion in collaboration with a government in German-occupied territory between 1933 and 1944.

Tang, joined by Judge Robert Beezer, said the government failed to prove its case and rejected written statements from nine Soviet witnesses, saying that their depositions against Laipenieks may have been written in the Soviet Union under “intimidating” circumstances.

Tang noted that the witnesses failed to identify photographs of Laipenieks.

However, dissenting Judge Robert Boochever said the court should have deferred to earlier findings of the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Before the war, Laipenieks was a schoolteacher and a star athlete, competing in the 5,000-meter run at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He said he joined the invading Nazis, after Russian troops murdered his parents and father-in-law.

After the war, he traveled to Chile, where he landed a job coaching that country’s Olympic track and field team. In 1960, he obtained a U.S. visa and became a physical education professor and coach at the University of Denver.

There, he said, he was contacted by the Central Intelligence Agency, which was seeking information about communists in Latvia. Laipenieks said he was recruited by CIA agents to persuade Soviet athletes competing in Western nations to defect.

In 1969, he came to California to coach track at La Jolla Country Day School and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1973. His application, he was told, was rejected, because his name was on a list of 37 alleged war criminals living in the United States.