Panama Balks Over Meese Plan to Deport Nazi Suspect : He Faces Execution in Russia

The Panamanian government today suspended plans to allow accused Nazi war criminal Karl Linnas to be deported from the United States to the Central American nation instead of to the Soviet Union, where he faces execution, an official at the Panamanian embassy said.

The minister of the Panamanian Embassy, Adolfo Arrocha, confirmed that his government had agreed to accept Linnas, but that plans for deportation were being delayed and that Panama is “going to study it further.”

Arrocha said he was unable to say how long the suspension would stay in place.

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III decided today to deport Linnas to Panama, according to Eli M. Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Council. But at the last minute Panama balked.

Still Behind Bars

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Korten refused to comment on Rosenbaum’s assertion beyond saying that as of early afternoon, Linnas was still behind bars in New York.

Linnas and his attorneys have been waging a court campaign to delay his deportation to the Soviet Union while they and the Justice Department search for another country that will accept him.

Sixteen other countries reportedly turned him down. But sources had said Panama agreed late Tuesday to accept Linnas and that Meese then agreed to deport him there as quickly as possible.

Linnas, a 67-year-old retired land surveyor from Long Island, N.Y., was condemned to death in absentia in the Soviet Union in 1962 for his reported role in Nazi executions of Jews and other prisoners in the Tartu concentration camp he is said to have run in Estonia during World War II.

‘Subversion of Justice’

In a telephone interview from New York, Rosenbaum called Meese’s decision to send Linnas to Panama “a subversion of justice in monumental proportions.”

Linnas “has been ordered by U.S. courts deported to the only country in the world that has asserted criminal jurisdiction in this case and is willing to take it,” Rosenbaum said.

“Instead, Mr. Meese is going to send him to a comfortable retirement under the Panamanian palm trees. This is a man who almost certainly has more blood on his hands than any other person in the United States.”

A delegation of prominent American Jews reportedly was flying from New York to Washington today to see the Panamanian ambassador.

Appeal to Be Heard Friday

On April 6, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall temporarily blocked Linnas’ deportation to the Soviet Union. The full U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to hear his final appeal on Friday.

Linnas, a native of Estonia, was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 after courts found that he had hidden his wartime role in Estonia when he entered the United States in 1951 and when he became a naturalized citizen in 1980. He has been jailed in New York since last April.

Ethnic organizations representing Baltic and Ukrainian emgires, along with former White House communications director Patrick Buchanan, have been lobbying to block the deportation.

Buchanan relayed to Meese in February a memo stating that President Reagan wants Linnas tried in the United States. The White House and the Justice Department have said that Reagan, however, was leaving the decision up to the attorney general.

Buchanan says the Soviets supplied American courts with forged evidence against another suspected Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, who is on trial in Israel on charges that he was “Ivan the Terrible,” the Ukrainian who operated the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp.