Nazi hunters ask Venezuela to track down suspects

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has asked Venezuela to help find 18 alleged Nazi war criminals it says are believed to be living in the South American nation.

The Los Angeles-based centre provided a list of names of 14 Lithuanians, three Latvians and one Estonian to Venezuela’s embassy in Tel Aviv on Monday.

The suspects are believed to have served with local security forces in the Soviet Union that persecuted civilians, primarily Jews, during World War Two, the centre said in a statement.

Efraim Zuroff, the centre’s director in Israel, said that investigators uncovered the names during recent research in Baltic countries.

‘‘The fall of the Soviet Union has resulted in greater access to the pertinent documentation necessary to track down the perpetrators of the crimes of the Holocaust,’’ he said.

‘‘We are hopeful that the Venezuelan authorities will cooperate with the Wiesenthal Center to ensure that their country does not continue to serve as a safe haven for Nazi war criminals.’’

In Caracas, Foreign Ministry officials could not immediately be reached by telephone for comment.

In 1986, the centre released a list of 242 suspected war criminals living in several nations. Three suspects were believed to be in Venezuela, including one accused of serving in the Vilnius Sonnderkommando, a Lithuanian volunteer group that assisted the Nazis in exterminating thousands of people in the Baltics.