Attorney Working on Demjanjuk Appeal Is Killed in Plunge
An attorney for convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk died Tuesday after jumping from an upper story of an office tower in an apparent suicide, a police spokesman said.
The death of 53-year-old Dov Eitan came less than a week before Israel’s Supreme Court was scheduled to hear Demjanjuk’s appeal of his conviction and death sentence for Nazi war crimes. The appeal had been set to begin next Monday.
Eitan, a former judge who recently joined Demjanjuk’s defense team, hurled himself from a 15th-floor window of the City Towers office complex in downtown Jerusalem, police spokesman Rafi Levy said.
Eitan resigned from his post as Jerusalem District Court judge in 1983 after causing an uproar by signing a petition protesting Israeli military involvement in Lebanon.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was convicted in April of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a brutal guard who operated gas chambers in which 850,000 Jews died at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
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