Accused Nazi Given Delay in Extradition : Artukovic Won’t Be Sent to Yugoslavia Until His Attorneys Exhaust All Appeals

Accused Nazi war criminal Andrija Artukovic on Wednesday was ordered extradited to Yugoslavia on an expanded charge of murdering thousands of innocent civilians, but a federal magistrate delayed the action until defense attorneys exhaust their appeals.

Estimates on how long it would take to resolve the appeal ranged from “possibly as quickly as several weeks” by Assistant U.S. Atty. David Nimmer to “around two years” by Artukovic’s lawyer, Gary B. Fleischman.

The 86-year-old Artukovic, legally blind and suffering from a variety of physical and mental ailments, sat in a wheelchair through Wednesday’s court session before U.S. Magistrate Volney V. Brown Jr., listening to an interpreter’s version of the proceedings.

Artukovic had been brought to the hearing in Los Angeles from a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., and was returned there Wednesday night.

At the outset of the hearing, Brown and Artukovic exchanged “good mornings.” The magistrate later said he took that as an indication that Artukovic’s mental state allowed him to understand the proceedings.

But Fleischman told the magistrate, “Mr. Artukovic is really out of it this morning. He doesn’t remember he was brought here from Missouri . . . and he doesn’t recognize me. Over the past few weeks, he has become increasingly psychotic.”

Nimmer argued that Artukovic’s present mental competence was not a factor in the hearing, and Brown agreed. The prosecutor submitted an affidavit from a U.S. Public Health Service physician that Artukovic’s condition has improved since he was transferred seven weeks ago to the Missouri facility.

But that statement was in sharp contrast to 25 staff reports from the hospital that Fleischman and co-counsel Michael Dacquisto put into the record during the 90-minute hearing.

Discussing the content of the hospital reports he submitted to Brown, Fleischman said:

“Those reports document what has been happening to him. He is being treated more like an animal than a human being. Locked up in a room by himself and tied into bed at night, he is suffering from sensory deprivation. He can’t read or watch TV because he is blind. He is talking to the walls. Part of the time, he thinks he is in Berlin. He is urinating and defecating on the floor. Dealing with him now is like talking to a babbling idiot, and I hate to characterize him that way because he was once a brilliant man.”

Dacquisto said Artukovic has refused to eat much of the time and has lost almost 10 pounds over the past week or so.

Artukovic’s attorneys tried to convince Brown that these circumstances warranted returning Artukovic to Long Beach Naval Hospital, where he was housed and treated during most of the extradition proceedings that started with his arrest in November at his Seal Beach home.

Request for Bail

Brown said he did not have the authority to do so. He also turned down Fleischman’s request to release Artukovic on bail so that he can be at home with his family during the appeal process.

“I’m sympathetic, but I don’t think what you’ve described in Missouri is a life-threatening situation,” the magistrate said.

In Wednesday’s proceeding, Brown accepted an amended indictment charging Artukovic with being responsible for thousands of civilian murders between 1941 and 1943 while he was minister of the interior for the Nazi puppet state of Croatia.

Brown had ordered the extradition of Artukovic two months ago, but in that March 4 ruling the magistrate said he could find evidence linking Artukovic to only a single murder. In the original indictment, Artukovic was implicated in the deaths of 700,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

Brown gave Yugoslav officials 60 days to provide additional documentation, which they did by charging five incidents of mass murder. These included the killing of virtually the entire civilian population of villages near Vrgin Most and the machine-gunning and crushing by tanks of hundreds of people in the Zumberg region of Yugoslavia.

The amended indictment also included the charge that Artukovic ordered the death of Dr. Jesa Vidic, the murder count on which Brown originally ordered the extradition.

‘Significant Flaw’

Fleischman unsuccessfully sought to have Brown discount most of the new documentation, contending that the Yugoslav government had tried to cover up a “significant flaw” in the affidavit of Avdic Bajro, who maintained that while serving in Croatia’s elite presidential guard, he observed Artukovic order mass executions in 1941.

“Mr. Bajro could not have seen what he said he saw as a member of that particular unit because it did not exist in 1941,” Fleischman said, “and so in the English translation the name of that unit was conspicuously and intentionally deleted. I’d hate to think that they can get away with perpetrating a fraud on this court.”

Brown said he was very concerned about the discrepancy between the Yugoslav and English versions of the Bajro affidavit but said it was a question of the witness’s credibility and could only be properly raised at the time of Artukovic’s trial in Yugoslavia.