Dinko Sakic's Portfolio
From the Press
Srpska Mreza

A FORMER commander of a Second World War Croatian concentration camp has gone into hiding as Croatia made a formal request to the Argentine government for his extradition.

Dinko Sakic, 76, then a captain in the Ustashe regime of the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic, a wartime ally of Nazi Germany, is accused of perpetrating atrocities in the Jasenovac camp, where up to 600,000 Jews, Gypsies, Muslims and Serbs are believed to have been murdered.

In 1947, Sakic escaped to Argentina, which the fascist sympathies of the populist post-war president, Gen Juan Peron, made a favourite refuge for leading Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann and possibly Josef Mengele. Pavelic also lived there.

In a local television interview Sakic acknowledged that he was a commander at the camp, but said: "Nothing happened in Jasenovac. It was a work camp where the Jews managed themselves. We never put a hand on any of the prisoners in the camp. The people died of natural causes. There was a typhus epidemic, for example, but there were no cremation ovens that killed anybody."

Despite having said he wanted to be extradited "to prove his innocence" he has disappeared from his home in the Atlantic resort of Santa Teresita, 190 miles south-east of Buenos Aires. His wife told reporters that he was "as innocent as a baby".