Belgrade (ANTARA News/AFP) - Serbia has issued an international arrest warrant for a Croatian woman suspected of having committed genocide and crimes against humanity in a World War II death camp, the justice ministry said Friday.

"Following a request by the (national) war crimes court, the Justice Ministry agreed to issue an Interpol arrest warrant for Nada Sakic, suspected of the most severe war crimes," justice ministry official Slobodan Homen told AFP.

Sakic, 85, was chief of the women`s section at Stara Gradiska camp, part of the vast Jasenocvac death camp complex. Jasenovac is known as the "Croatian Auschwitz" and was run by her husband Dinko Sakic.

The Sakics lived in Argentina until 1998, when they were extradited to Croatia. Nada Sakic was probed by Croatian authorities at the time but released due to lack of evidence in early 1999.

According to Serbian media she is currently living in Argentina and has citizenship in the South American country.

But Croatian media, including the national HINA news agency, reported meanwhile that Nada Sakic lived in Zagreb where she died on February 5.

The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Nada Sakic is alleged to have worked in Stara Gradiska from October 1942 until the beginning of 1945. She is accused of torturing inmates and starving them to death as well as selecting ill and weak inmates and children who were killed in so-called death transports in trucks converted to mobile gas chambers.

Dinko Sakic was sentenced to 20 years in prison for crimes against humanity after being found guilty for the deaths of at least 2,000 inmates. He died in a Croatian prison in 2008.

The Sakic couple were former officials of the Ustasha, the name given to the pro-Nazi puppet regime in Croatia, notorious for conducting mass executions of non-Croats under racial laws passed in 1941.

The number of victims -- Jews, Serbs and anti-fascist Croats -- killed at Jasenovac remains unclear and estimates range from 85,000 to 700,000, while the Vienna-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre says some 500,000 died.

According to the HINA news agency, Nada Sakic died in Zagreb on February 5, and was cremated four days late at a cemetery in Zagreb where she had been living. (*)

Editor: Kunto Wibisono
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