ZAGREB (AFP)---A former official of Croatia’s World War II pro-Nazi regime suspected of war crimes has died in Argentina, the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre said.

"Ivo Rojnica passed away last week in Argentina without being processed" for war crimes, the Centre’s Israel director Efraim Zuroff told AFP in a telephone interview.

"This is the failure primarily by the Croatian judicial system," Zuroff said adding that Zagreb had been following up on the Centre’s demands to investigate Rojnica for the past two years without taking any action.

He said they had never submitted an indictment or asked for his extradition.

"The Argentine government was willing to send him to Croatia. The problem was that that (extradition) request never came."

He expressed regret that the death of Rojnica, 92, was particularly disturbing since the former official of Croatia’s World War II Ustasha regime was an "unrepentant war criminal."

The Wiesenthal Centre, which repeatedly warned Croatia over its failure to prosecute Rojnica, charged that he had played an active role in the persecution of Serbs, Jews and Roma in the area of the southern Adriatic town of Dubrovnik.

After World War II, Rojnica fled to Argentina, where he obtained citizenship and became a leader in the local Croatian community.

Following Zagreb’s proclamation of independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, the late nationalist president Franjo Tudjman named Rojnica to the post of Croatian ambassador to Argentina.

However Tudjman later gave up the idea under pressure from the international community.

The Ustasha regime killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, anti-fascist Croatians, Roma and others in Croatian concentration camps.