Awaiting extradition, Bohdan Koziy dies (12/07/03)

Awaiting extradition, Bohdan Koziy dies

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica - Former U.S. resident Bohdan Koziy, who was awaiting extradition to Poland, where he was to stand trial on war crimes charges, died on December 1 in Costa Rica, where he had lived since 1987. He had suffered a stroke last week, reported the Associated Press.

Just days earlier a judge had ruled that the 80-year-old Mr. Koziy was to be deported. He was accused of killing Jews while serving as a policeman for the occupying Nazi forces.

The JTA news agency had reported on November 6 that a court in Katowice, Poland, indicted Mr. Koziy at the request of prosecutor Ewa Koj of Warsaw's Institute of National Memory on charges that as a Nazi collaborator he killed a family and a young child.

JTA noted that Mr. Koziy rejected the charges against him. He had refused to speak to foreign reporters since being discovered in Costa Rica and had not spoken to local reporters since the late 1980s.

The Ukainian Weekly's archives note that a Soviet-supplied, videotaped testimony was used in the Koziy case, and he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1984 for concealing his wartime activities when he entered the U.S. Before the U.S. could deport him to the USSR to stand trial, he fled to Costa Rica, which refused a Soviet request to extradite him.

In 1987 Mr. Koziy was threatened with extradition to the Soviet Union to face charges that he assisted the Nazi occupiers of territories that were part of pre-war Poland and now fall within Ukraine. At the time, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner, blocked the extradition by playing on local anti-Communist sentiment, the JTA noted.

Mr. Koziy said in 1994 said he wanted to go home to his native Ivano-Frankivsk region in Ukraine. Also that year, The Weekly reported that Hanna Snegur, 64, recanted testimony she had given in 1976 regarding the Koziy case, thus calling into question the veracity of war crimes accusations against the former U.S. resident. Ms. Snegur said she was told she would be sent to "see the polar bears in Siberia" if she did not testify that in the autumn of 1943 she saw Mr. Koziy, a young Ukrainian militiaman in German-occupied Lysets, carrying off a 4-year-old girl named Monica Singer.

Mrs. Snegur said she was speaking out about the forced testimony 18 years later because, "I was a false witness and I don't want to sin before God and make an innocent person suffer."

The World Jewish Congress and the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center had repeatedly urged Costa Rica to expel Mr. Koziy, the AP reported.

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