Ex-mufti of Jerusalem Placed on War Criminals List; Indicted by Yugoslav Government

Hadj Amin el-Husseini, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has been officially placed on the war criminals list of the United Nations, the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation reported today.

The committee, which sent a memorandum to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and several European governments, last April, asking indictment of the ex-Mufti, made public a cable from Sava Kosanovich, Minister of the Interior and Information in the Yugoslav Government, declaring that “Mufti Hadj Amin el-Husseini put by Yugoslavia on list of war criminals.”

The steps which led up to the indictment of the Mufti, who is now held under comfortable house arrest in a villa outside of Paris, were described by the committee as follows:

In reply to its original request to the War Crimes Commission that it place the Mufti on its list of criminals, the commission stated that before doing so one of its member governments would have to present evidence constituting a prima facie case.

Upon receipt of this cable, a committee representative discussed the matter with Ivan Subasic, Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs, while he was at San Francisco, pointing out that the Mufti had organized the German S.S. Moslem Division in Bosnie and been responsible for the massacre of Yugoslav Moslems who refused to collaborate with the Germans.

It was reported recently that there was little possiblity that the Mufti would be punished, since the British, who had been seeking him on various charges, had made no move to extradite him from France, and it was rumored that the French were treating him with great deference with a view of making use of him in their attempt to win Arab support in the Levant and North Africa.