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88-year-old John Demjanjuk is also being sought by Germany.
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MADRID (AFP)---Spain's National Court has accepted a lawsuit against four men who allegedly worked as guards at Nazi concentration camps in Austria and Germany where thousands of Spaniards died.
The court ruled it would proceed with the lawsuit brought against the four men who live in the United States by Brussels-based rights organization, Equipo Nizkor, under Spain's principle of "universal jurisdiction", daily newspaper El Mundo reported on its website.
Under this principle, adopted by the Spanish judiciary in 2005, crimes against humanity, war crimes, terrorism and other heinous offences can be prosecuted in Spain even if they were allegedly committed abroad.
The lawsuit names John Demjanjuk, an 88-year-old who is also being sought by Germany, as well as Anton Tittjung, Josias Kumpf and Johann Leprich, as suspects.
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Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel for war crimes, based on his identification by Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible", a notorious SS guard at the Treblinka extermination camp during the period 1942-1943 who committed murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners. His conviction for crimes against humanity was later overturned by Israel's highest court by a finding of a 'reasonable doubt.'
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It demands that the four men be extradited to Spain to stand trial for the deaths of Spanish citizens at camps at Flossenberg and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Mauthausen in Nazi-occupied Austria where they allegedly worked as guards.
More than 7,000 Spaniards were held prisoner at the Mauthausen camp and over 4,300 of them died, El Mundo reported.
Spanish judges have invoked the principle of "universal jurisdiction" to prosecute figures such as Chilean right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet or generals from Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s with limited success.