SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Newly discovered dental X-rays prove with 'absolute certainty' Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele is dead, Brazilian and American experts say.
But officials in Israel and West Germany want to study the new evidence before reaching a final conclusion.
'This is the final proof that definitely closes the Mengele case. Not even the most skeptical person could have any doubts now that he is dead,' Brazilian federal police chief Romeu Tuma, who carried out the Mengele investigation, said Thursday.
'It is my opinion that the skeleton identified by an international panel of forensic scientists as Josef Mengele with reasonable scientific certainty, may now be identified as Josef Mengele with an absolute certainty,' said Dr. Lowell Levine, an American dental scientist sent by the U.S. Justice Department to Brazil over the weekend to study the X-rays.
'A single X-ray film is as good as a fingerprint,' Levine said. 'There is no possible doubt the skeleton was Mengele.'
Brazilian police Thursday said that a set of eight dental X-rays found at a Sao Paulo dentist's office perfectly match a skull unearthed last year that was identified by the international team of forensics experts as Mengele, the SS doctor known as the Angel of Death. He was accused of sending 400,000 inmates to their deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
'Israel will make its position known in the coming days,' said Israeil vice-consul Pinchas Bar, who said he will send the new information to his government.
'I will send all the documents so that the special team that deals with the Mengele case in Germany can study them,' said West German consul Norbert Harald Nadolski.
Authorities, following a tip from West German police, last June near Sao Paulo exhumed the skeleton of a man from a cemetery who drowned in 1979 off the Brazilian coast.
Local residents testified they helped Mengele live in hiding and buried him under an assumed name. Forensic experts from the United States, Brazil and West Germany, accompanied by Israeli observers, concluded 'within a reasonable scientific certainty' the skeleton was Mengele.
Mengele's son, Rolf, also told authorities his father died in Brazil.
Brazilian, American and West German forensics experts, watched by Israeli observers, last year conducted sophisticated computer-assisted tests to determine 'within a reasonable, 99 percent scientific certainty' that the skeleton was Mengele. But some people, including his Auschwitz victims, said they believed Mengele may have plotted his own false 'death' with well-placed clues leading to someone else's body.
However, American consular officials in Sao Paulo who spent weeks poring over a translation of a diary Mengele kept in his final years of life in Brazil found an encoded mention of two visits to a dentist.
They tracked down the dentist and got the X-rays, and experts compared them not only to the skull but also to computer-assisted superimpositions of the skull on wartime pictures of Mengele. Everything matched.
