Artukovic Loses Pardon Appeal : Yugoslav Presidency Refuses to Set Aside Death Verdict

The Yugoslav state presidency announced Tuesday it rejected a pardon appeal for Andrija Artukovic, the World War II Nazi police minister sentenced to death for mass murders of civilians and prisoners.

An attorney at the Belgrade office of defense lawyer Srdja Popovic said the defense now will ask the district court of Zagreb to suspend Artukovic’s death sentence because of the 87-year-old man’s failing health.

Yugoslav officials said more than 700,000 Jews, Gypsies, Serbs and Croats, many of them women and children were killed in concentration camps while Artukovic was police minister of Nazi Croatia during World War II.

Artukovic lived in Seal Beach, Calif., before losing his 35-year struggle against extradition last Feb. 12. He entered the United States in 1948 on a false passport and never became a U.S. citizen.

The state presidency, a nine-man collective that has run Yugoslavia since the death of President Josip Broz Tito in 1980, said it had decided to reject Artukovic’s appeal for a pardon.

Under Yugoslav law, the federal Secretariat for Justice was required to petition the presidency for pardon of the condemned man.

Artukovic has been confined in a special hospital room at the city jail of Zagreb. His lawyers say he suffers from degenerative brain disease, a bad heart, high blood pressure and was classified legally blind in the United States.

Last month the Yugoslav federal court rejected a defense motion to reduce Artukovic’s sentence despite a turn for the worse in his health.

On May 14 after a one-month public trial, the district court in Zagreb, capital of the Croatian state in western Yugoslavia, sentenced Artukovic to death for war crimes committed in the period 1941-45.

On July 24, the Croatian Supreme Court in Zagreb rejected Artukovic’s appeal and upheld the death penalty. The court rejected the defense contention that Artukovic had not been fit to stand trial because of his poor health and old age.

On Sept. 2, the Yugoslav federal court in Belgrade also rejected Artukovic’s appeal. Two days later it quashed the defense’s “extra legal motion” to reduce the sentence on grounds of “seriously deteriorating health.”

A death sentence here is normally carried out by firing squad. No execution date has been announced.