ASUNCION, Paraguay -- The Interior Ministry said Nazi fugitive Josef Mengele, known as the 'Angel of Death,' fled Paraguay 20 years ago and is not in the country where he was reportedly hiding.
Interior Ministry Undersecretary Miguel Angel Bestard Tuesday denied a report by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that Mengele, the Auschwitz physician who conducted medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, was living in a small Mennonite community on the Paraguay-Bolivia border.
'Every 90 days, Wiesenthal produces a regular declaration about Mengele, locating him in various areas of South America,' Bestard said in denying the report.
Wiesenthal, who established the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, told Newsweek magazine that Mengele was located at the end of last year in a Mennonite town on the border between Bolivia and Paraguay.
'To the people living there, (Mengele) is a refugee, and they are not in a hurry to deliver him to the police. The Mennonites believe in justice after death,' Wiesenthal told the magazine.
Bestard said Mengele left Paraguay some 20 years ago before German courts had time to ask for his extradition.
'If Wiesenthal is unaware of that, his information is not very credible,' Bestard said.
Kornelius Sawaczky, administrator of the Loma Plata colony, the most important Mennonite community in the Paraguayan Chaco region, said Wiesenthal's report was inaccurate.
He said there were no Mennonite colonies in Paraguayan territory near the Bolivian border. All of them, he said, are located in west-central Paraguay, far from the border.
The closest colony is 400 miles from the Bolivian border, he said.
