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Russian politician to sue Germany for family's death

Updated: 05/Jul/2006 14:06

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russian right-winger

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MOSCOW (EJP)--- Russian right-winger Vladimir Zhirinovsky has said he plans to sue Germany for killing his family during WWII.

The leader of Russia's ultra nationalist Liberal Democratic party and a deputy speaker of Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, also said he would sue Israeli doctors for failing to save his father, Volf Eidelstein, after being critically wounded in a car accident on 1983 in Tel Aviv, where he was later buried.

After almost all of Zhirinovsky's family was killed in a Nazi invasion on Kostopol, Ukraine, in 1941, Zhirinovski’s father fled to Kazakhstan and lin 1949 to Israel.

There, according to his son, he joined the Herut party of former Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin.

Anti-Semitic comments

Zhirinovsky, who was recently in Israel, visited his father's grave in Holon for the first time. "For 60 years, I didn't know anything about my father," Zhirinovsky told the Israeli press, adding that he had been looking for him for half a century.

He added that he still has family in Israel and that this was not his first trip to the country. During the elections of 2003 he flew in to support an extreme-right Russian party, which obtained only few hundreds of votes.

Although Zhirinovsky has acknowledged that his father was Jewish, he refused to observe a minute’s silence in the Duma for the Nazi's Jewish victims, saying it would be an “insult” to the millions of Russians who perished during WWII.

In past remarks he has referred to Jews as "enemies" of Russia and a "degenerated nation".

Agence France Presse contributed to this report

Day in history

1945: Germany

The Nuremberg Trials begin. Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals of World War II start at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.