FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM June 19, 1996 (202) 514-2008 TDD (202 514-1888 ALLEGED NAZI CRIMINAL FLEES THE UNITED STATES AND RETURNS TO LITHUANIA WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Justice announced today that Aleksandras Lileikis, who was ordered denaturalized by a Federal Court in Boston last month has fled the United States and returned to Lithuania. The Lithuanian government confirmed today that Lileikis, 88, arrived last night in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the city in which he served during World War II as chief of the Nazi- sponsored Lithuanian Security Police. In his decision issued last May 24, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns ruled that Lileikis' activities as head of the Lithuanian Security Police (the Saugumas in Lithuanian) "clearly constitute" personal participation in persecution. During World War II, 55,000 of Vilnius' 60,000 Jews perished. Before their deaths, they were confined in inhumane conditions in an overcrowded ghetto with primitive sanitation and little food. Saugumas officers arrested Jews attempting to escape from the ghetto and routinely consigned them to Vilnius' infamous Lukiskes Prison. The doomed Jews were then taken 10 kilometers outside of Vilnius to the isolated Paneriai (also known as Ponary) killing site, where men, women and children were stripped to their underwear, and gunned down in sand pits by a group of local volunteers known as the "Special Detachment" (Ypatingas Burys in Lithuanian). The Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the U. S. Attorney's office in Boston filed a denaturalization complaint against Lileikis in September 1994. For 18 months, Lileikis resisted efforts by OSI and the U.S. Attorney's office to force him to answer the allegations that he was a central figure in the Nazi-directed annihilation of the Jews of Vilnius, which before World War II was one of the premier centers of European Jewish life. Despite court orders Lileikis repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked about his wartime activities. The Government filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the evidence against Lileikis was so overwhelming and uncontroverted that a trial was not needed. On May 24, Judge Stearns granted the motion, finding that "tens of thousands . . . died under his command of the Saugumas." Lileikis immigrated to the United States in 1955 and worked for a printing company near Boston. At the time of his flight from the United States, he lived in Norwood, Massachusetts. OSI Director Eli M. Rosenbaum said today that "Lileikis' flight is an important victory in the U.S. Government's ongoing and intensive efforts to secure a measure of justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi barbarism." He disclosed that OSI had shared its evidence with the Lithuanian government "fully and completely," and noted that the authorities in Vilnius have said that they intend to question Lileikis this week. According to Rosenbaum, the access gained by OSI to archives in the formerly communist countries of eastern and central Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union had "significantly enhanced" the Department's ability to identify and take legal action against former participants in Nazi persecution who immigrated to the United States after World War II. The Lileikis prosecution, Rosenbaum added, was a direct consequence of this access. Since OSI began operation in 1979, 56 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 47 persons have been removed from the United States. More than 300 persons remain under investigation. ### 96-289