Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who lived an unassuming life in New York City for decades until his past was revealed and he was deported to Germany last year, has died, German media reported Thursday. He was 95.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Westfaelische Nachrichten newspapers independently quoted German officials saying Palij died Wednesday in a care home in the town of Ahlen.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, who lobbied for Germany to take Palij, said he had been informed of the death. He credited U.S. President Donald Trump with seeing through Palij’s August 2018 deportation after it had been stalled for a quarter-century.

“It would have been upsetting to many Americans if he had died in the U.S. in what many viewed as a comfortable escape,” Grenell told The Associated Press.

Palij was the last Nazi facing deportation from the United States when he was taken from his Queens home on a stretcher and put on a plane to Germany.

“An evil man has passed away. That, I guess, is a positive,” said Rabbi Zev Meir Friedman, who had led protests at Palij’s home.

Dov Hikind, a longtime New York lawmaker who fought for Palij’s deportation, said the death brings “the closure survivors of the Holocaust needed.”

Lying about past

From the time American investigators first accused Palij of lying about his Nazi past, it took 25 years for his removal from the United States despite political pressure and frequent protests outside his home. He was not prosecuted in Germany and spent his last months in the nursing home.

Palij, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now in Ukraine, entered the U.S. in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act, a law meant to help refugees from postwar Europe.

He told immigration officials he worked during the war in a woodshop and farm in Nazi-occupied Poland, as well as at another farm in Germany and finally in a German upholstery factory.

Palij said he never served in the military. In reality, the U.S. Justice Department said he played an essential role in the Nazi program to exterminate Jews as an armed guard at the Trawniki training camp, southeast of Lublin in German-occupied Poland.

When investigators knocked on his door in 1993, he told them: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.”

According to a Justice Department complaint, Palij served in a unit that “committed atrocities against Polish civilians and others” and then in the notorious SS Streibel Battalion, “a unit whose function was to round up and guard thousands of Polish civilian forced laborers.”

Palij served at Trawniki in 1943, the same year 6,000 prisoners in the camps and tens of thousands of other prisoners held in occupied Poland were rounded up and slaughtered.

Palij eventually acknowledged serving in Trawniki but denied any involvement in war crimes.

Stripped of citizenship

The U.S. lacks jurisdiction to prosecute such cases since the crimes were not committed in the United States and the victims were not Americans. Instead, it has focused on revoking the U.S. citizenship of suspects and deporting them — or extraditing them if another country is seeking to prosecute them.

A judge stripped Palij of his U.S. citizenship in 2003 for “participation in acts against Jewish civilians.” He was ordered deported a year later. But because Germany, Poland, Ukraine and other countries refused to take him, he continued living in limbo in the two-story, red brick home in Queens he shared with his now-late wife, Maria.

After a diplomatic push, the U.S. finally persuaded Germany last year to take Palij. However, German investigators concluded there was not enough evidence of wartime criminal activity to bring charges against him.

“Good riddance to this war criminal,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said after Palij’s deportation was announced.

Palij had managed to live quietly in the U.S. for years as a draftsman and then as a retiree until a fellow former guard told Canadian authorities in 1989 that Palij was “living somewhere in America.”

Investigators asked Russia and other countries for records on Palij beginning in 1990 and first confronted him in 1993. It wasn’t until after a second interview in 2001 that he signed a document acknowledging he had been a guard at Trawniki and a member of the Streibel Battalion.

Palij suggested at one point during the interview that he was threatened with death if he refused to work as a guard, saying, “If you don’t show up, boom-boom.”

As his case languished, his continued presence in New York City outraged many, especially members of the Jewish community. The frequent protests outside his home featured chants such as “Your neighbor is a Nazi!”

In 2017, all 29 members of New York’s congressional delegation signed a letter urging the State Department to follow through on his deportation.
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The long-awaited trial of a Frenchman accused of killing four people at a Jewish museum in the Belgian capital began Thursday in Brussels. The defendant, Mehdi Nemmouche, also is believed to be among the first European jihadist fighters who returned from the Middle East. 

Mehdi Nemmouche, now 33, appeared in court wearing an orange sweatshirt and flanked by masked police. He is accused of shooting dead four people in under two minutes in 2014, at the Jewish museum in Brussels. He also is believed to be the first jihadist fighter returning from Syria’s battlefields to stage a terrorist attack in Europe.

Suspect arrested in Marseilles

Days after the shootings, Nemmouche was arrested in the southern French city of Marseilles as he got off a bus from Brussels. Police reportedly found weapons in a sports bag he was carrying.

If found guilty, he faces life in prison. Another Frenchman also is on trial for allegedly supplying Nemmouche’s weapons.

Museum director: Trial will help people move on

Jewish Museum director Pascale Alhadeff told reporters the page on the killings will never be fully turned but that this trial, at the very least, will allow people to move past it a bit more and shed light on what happened.

One of Nemmouche’s lawyers, Sebastien Courtoy, said he would prove Nemmouche was not the assailant.

He said allegations of Islamic State involvement and Nemmouche as a lone wolf attacker for the terrorist group simply wouldn’t stick.

Nemmouche previously had been in prison for petty crime and allegedly became radicalized behind bars. French authorities believe he also fought alongside Islamic State in Syria, and was among the jailers of four French journalists held hostage there between 2013 and 2014, along with other Iraqi and Syrian prisoners.

Violent and crafty

One of the four reporters, Didier Francois of Europe 1 Radio, said in an interview with the station that Nemmouche was violent and crafty.

Francois said Nemmouche treated the French reporters badly, like crushing their fingernails, although the treatment paled to the way Nemmouche tortured Iraqi and Syrian prisoners. Francois recalls heading to the toilet in the mornings and stepping over bloody bodies.

Investigators say there are links between Nemmouche and other jihadists who carried out subsequent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. He faces a separate trial in France on charges of holding French hostages in Syria. 
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Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, is taking an increasingly visible role in the British royal family as she becomes the patron of four organizations including the prestigious National Theatre.

Kensington Palace said Thursday that Meghan will take over two roles as patron that have for decades been held by Queen Elizabeth II and is taking two other roles as well.

The palace says the queen “has passed on” the role of patron of the National Theatre and the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

In addition, Meghan will become patron of two additional charities: Smart Works, which helps vulnerable women find the skills needed to work, and Mayhew, a grassroots organization active in London and internationally.

Meghan and her husband Prince Harry are expecting their first child this spring.

 
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Scattered throughout the city’s outlying neighborhoods, Moscow’s Soviet-era cinemas have for decades served as the center of communities.

With names like “Mars” and “The Diamond,” the cinemas were mostly built in the 1960s and 70s during a Soviet film boom and were popular even after the collapse of the USSR, offering cheaper tickets than their counterparts in shopping centers.

Now — as part of a wider plan changing the face of the Russian capital — almost 40 of them are being turned into modern glass complexes.

Developers say the project will brighten up dreary suburbs and bring more life to dormant residential districts.  

But it has faced a backlash from activists and residents, who say it will deprive locals of community focal points and destroy important architectural heritage.

The plan is part of a major city redevelopment program led by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin that has included the construction of a multi-billion-dollar park and the demolition of Soviet-era pre-fab apartments.

Real estate company ADG Group bought 39 Soviet-built cinemas from the government and plans to turn them into what it calls “neighborhood centers.”

‘There is nothing there’

Grigory Pechersky, ADG Group’s founder and co-director, said the majority of the cinemas were in “extremely poor” condition when his company bought them in 2014.

“Around half of them were closed since the 1990s,” he told AFP in the group’s central Moscow office.  

Pechersky said the project aims to “recreate the historical function of the cinemas, which is for residents to spend their free time comfortably.”

Moscow’s infrastructure in residential areas is limited, he said, and Muscovites tend to travel to the huge city’s center for quality entertainment and shopping.  

“Those areas are very densely populated but in many cases there is nothing there,” he said, adding that around 10 million people live between Moscow’s two main beltways where the cinemas are located.

All but three of the cinemas will be completely torn down and rebuilt.

One of those surviving is the 1938 Rodina (Motherland) cinema, a Stalinist landmark in northeastern Moscow with huge pillars and Soviet mosaics, where ADG Group plans to reopen the building’s original rooftop terrace.  

‘Little architectural value’

The rest of the cinemas were built in the brutalist style — a utilitarian form of architecture popular in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century.  

Built in the shape of simple squares, some are on local high streets such as Almaz (The Diamond), a 1964 cinema painted turquoise in southern Moscow’s leafy Shabolovka district.

Others — like the Angara, which is named after a Siberian river and already under reconstruction — are surrounded by typical late-Soviet housing blocks.

According to ADG Group, they have “little architectural value.”

The company hired the British architectural firm run by Amanda Levete — who has worked on London’s V&A Museum and Lisbon’s MAAT contemporary art center — to design a concept for the new cinemas.

The group’s main architect Alexei Belyakov said the cinemas will be reconstructed in a similar style, to form a recognizable “network” across the far-flung districts.

In drawings seen by AFP, they will all have a glass front and will be considerably larger, to make room for retail space and cafes.

All they will retain is the logos of their original names — taken from cities and rivers of the Soviet Union, planets, mountains and precious stones.

Belyakov said that while the cinemas “were built in the spirit of the time, they are not practical anymore.”  

‘Our favorite cinema’

But many Moscow architects disagree.

Ruben Arakelyan, who runs a Moscow-based architectural bureau, said that while it’s “right” to revive the cinemas, the brutalist buildings could have been preserved.

He said some of the cinemas began “dying out” when people increasingly started to travel to the city center for work after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Local activists worry the cinemas will be turned into regular shopping malls — of which Moscow already has an abundance.

“They tell us that these are depressing places that need to be torn down,” said Klim Likhachev, the head of a residents’ group to save the Almaz cinema.  

“But this is our favorite cinema. Nobody asked the residents,” Likhachev said. “By reconstruction they actually mean demolition. They are calling it a ‘neighborhood center’, but it will in fact be another banal shopping center.”  

Activist Pyotr Ivanov said the problem with the plan was that it assumed each neighborhood where the cinemas are based had the same needs.

“All of them are different. You could only make universal decisions like that in a command economy like the Soviet Union,” he said.

Two Metro stations away from Almaz, residents have also been fighting to preserve the Ulaanbaatar, named after the capital of once Soviet-friendly Mongolia.

Another of the movie theaters, the Baku Cinema in northwestern Moscow, has served as a community center for the Azerbaijani diaspora since the Soviet era.

ADG Group’s Belyakov brushed aside criticism, saying it was important for the Russian capital to look to the future.

“Moscow is moving forward,” he said.
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Fears are mounting for Paul Whelan, the former U.S. marine seized last month in a Moscow hotel after being accused of espionage. Western intelligence officers and analysts fear he may remain in detention in Russia for a long time and are casting doubt on the likelihood of a spy exchange.

Kremlin officials are dismissing the idea he’d be a candidate for a prisoner swap. Their U.S. counterparts say there can’t be any kind of exchange, as he’s not a spy. Kremlin officials Wednesday dismissed a claim by British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt that Russia might use the former Canadian-born U.S. citizen as a pawn in a diplomatic game.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “In Russia, we never use people as pawns in diplomatic games. In Russia, we conduct counterintelligence activity against those suspected of espionage. That is done regularly.”

Hunt last week said the British government was “extremely worried” about the well-being of 48-year-old Whelan, who also holds British citizenship, as well as Irish and Canadian passports, suggesting the Russians might try to use him as leverage for the release of Russia’s Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty to infiltrating America’s conservative political movement as a Kremlin-directed agent. Butina was convicted of acting as a foreign agent in the United States.

Whelan was arrested Dec. 28 in Moscow. According to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), he was detained while “on a spy mission” and had been caught “during an act of espionage.”

The Washington Post reported Whelan was arrested in his room at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow after he had accepted from an unidentified man a flash drive containing a list of employees for a clandestine Russian agency.

Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman was allowed to visit Whelan, who reportedly is being held at the notorious Lefortovo prison, which was used during the purges of the 1930s by Josef Stalin’s NKVD agents and which once housed dissidents such as writer and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Whelan’s family says he’s innocent and was in Russia, which he has visited several times, for a wedding. Speaking to Euronews television this week, his brother, David, also worried about the length of time he may be held.

“It clearly could take months, and unfortunately, maybe even years before we get him home,” he said.

Whelan could receive a 20-year jail term if he is convicted of espionage.

Comparisons with 1986 case

Analysts and former intelligence officials are comparing Whelan’s case with that of journalist Nick Daniloff, who in 1986 was arrested by the then-KGB and accused of espionage after having been handed an unsolicited package of confidential documents.

The Reagan administration said the Soviets arrested Daniloff without cause in retaliation for the arrest three days earlier of Gennadi Zakharov, a physicist at the Soviet U.N. Mission in New York. Zakharov had received classified documents about U.S. Air Force jet engines.

After 13 days and intense diplomacy, Daniloff was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without charge, along with Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov. Zakharov was permitted to leave the U.S. But the affair also triggered rounds of expulsions by both sides of dozens of diplomats and suspected spies.

The time Whelan spends in jail may not be as brief, some observers fear. U.S. intelligence officials say they would be loath to agree to a swap for a self-confessed Kremlin agent such as Butina for an apparently innocent American, as this could invite the Russians to organize other setups of U.S. civilians, creating an open season.

Ned Price, a former Obama administration State Department official, said he thinks the Kremlin may be seeking to swap Whelan for Butina.

“The Russians may calculate that Whelan, a military veteran who has said positive things about President Donald Trump on Russian social media, constitutes the perfect quo for their quid,” he wrote in an opinion article.

Former U.S. intelligence officials say it is highly unlikely that Whelan, who has had a checkered past and left the U.S. Marines with a dishonorable discharge, and was found guilty of attempting to steal $10,000 worth of currency from the U.S. government while deployed to Iraq in 2006, could have been working for a clandestine U.S. agency.

The picture that has emerged of Whelan is complex. Since 2007, he has traveled regularly to Russia both for pleasure and business. He works in corporate security for the automotive industry. He has a fascination for Russia, was trying to learn the language and had an active profile on the Russian social media platform VKontakte.

The Whelan case could be further complicated by the arrest on the Northern Mariana Islands on Dec. 29 of Russian citizen Dmitry Makarenko by U.S. authorities.

Makarenko was moved to Florida after being detained by FBI officers allegedly for conspiring with another man to export U.S. defense articles, including night-vision scopes, to Russia without U.S. approval.

Kremlin officials have accused the U.S. of detaining Makarenko in retaliation for the arrest of Whelan, but the case against Makarenko goes back to 2017, according to court papers filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

 
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