Former Nazi death camp secy caught

A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary who fled hours before the opening of her trial in Germany has been found, a court said yesterday in a dramatic start to the proceedings.

The court in the northern town of Itzehoe had issued an arrest warrant for Irmgard Furchner, one of the first women to be prosecuted for Nazi-era crimes in decades, after she failed to show up at the trial.

Furchner had left her retirement home near Hamburg and taken a taxi to a subway station, said Frederike Milhoffer, a spokeswoman for the court, but she was not present when the proceedings were due to begin.

The suspect was charged with complicity in the murders of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp in occupied Poland.