Deportation of Karl Linnas to Russia Barred

A Supreme Court justice today blocked the deportation of Karl Linnas, who faces a Soviet death sentence for allegedly supervising mass executions at a Nazi concentration camp.

Justice Thurgood Marshall granted an emergency request aimed at keeping Linnas in this country until the full Supreme Court considers his formal appeal.

Marshall’s order said Linnas should not be deported “until further order of this court,” but Marshall gave no indication when that order might be issued.

Linnas, 67, has been held at a New York City jail since April, 1986.

Previously a resident of Greenlawn in Long Island, N.Y., Linnas has lived in the United States since 1951. He became a U.S. citizen in 1959.

False Pretenses Charged

Immigration officials in 1979 charged that he entered the country under false pretenses. He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1982 and has been fighting deportation ever since.

Linnas is accused of running a World War II concentration camp in the city of Tartu in Estonia, now part of the Soviet Union. About 2,000 people were killed in the two years he ran the camp, 1941 and 1942.

Linnas was tried in absentia in the Soviet Union in 1962 and was sentenced to death.

He has gained the support of Patrick Buchanan, former White House communications director, who has been waging a campaign against revoking American citizenship based on Soviet-supplied evidence.