The trial of… John Demjanjuk may have been based on fabricated evidence, the FBI has claimed.
Lawyers for the 90-year-old Ukrainian accused of being a guard at the SS [prison] camp Sobibor during World War Two today asked for the trial to be suspended in the light of the report.
At issue is Exhibit A in the case, Demjanjuk's alleged SS identity card.
According to an FBI report from 25 years ago that has just surfaced, the agency deemed that it was 'quite likely fabricated' by [Jewish?] KGB agents in the former Soviet Union.
Claims that the card and other evidence against Demjanjuk are Soviet forgeries have repeatedly been made by his defence lawyers.
However, the FBI report provides the first-known confirmation that U.S. investigators had similar doubts.
'Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB,' the FBI's Cleveland field office said in a 1985 report - four years after the Soviets had shown U.S. investigators the card.
Demjanjuk had served in the Red Army before being captured by the Nazis in 1942…
FBI agents argued that the Soviets had an interest in faking the documents as part of a campaign to smear anti-communist emigres.
Demjanjuk always claimed he was captured by the Nazis, imprisoned and volunteered to fight in an anti-Communist German unit called the Vlaslov Army.
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