Berlin/Washington - When a Munich court issued an arrest warrant in one of the longest outstanding cases from World War II, it signalled the resumption of an off-again, on-again prosecution that until now has led nowhere.

The court issued the warrant Wednesday for John Demjanjuk, 88, who is accused of being a brutal guard at the Nazi's Sobibor death damp, in present-day Poland.

German prosecutors claimed that from March to the end of September 1943, Demjanjuk was a guard implicated as an accessory in the murders of at least 29,000 Jews at the camp.

Wednesday's move by the Munich court could represent the first steps in paving the way for the extradition of Demjanjuk from the United States, where he currently resides.

Demjanjuk has already been tried once and sentenced to death in Israel two decades ago, only to be freed by a court that doubted the veracity of some of the evidence.

In the current attempt, Munich prosecutors applied for the warrant based on a document from Bavarian criminal investigators that testified to the authenticity of the SS identity card provided by US officials.

The United States, which has already stripped Demjanjuk of his citizenship, said late Wednesday that it would continue to lend support to Germany as it prosecutes the Ukraine-born suspect.

"The US government, through the Department of Justice and State, has been in close contact with our German counterparts on this matter, and we will continue to offer our support and assistance," Laura Sweeney, spokeswoman for the US Department of Justice, said in a statement.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, a Jewish human rights organization involved in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, expressed its "deep concern about the continuing delays in the extradition process."

Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker in the US state of Ohio, battled US authorities over his citizenship revocation for years, only to lose last year.

US authorities have been working to extradite Demjanjuk for decades.

Demjanjuk lived in Munich, Germany, as a refugee shortly after the end of World War II before being resettled in the United States in 1952.

However, when allegations about his role as a death camp guard emerged at the end of the 1970s, US authorities agreed to send him to Israel in 1986.

An identity card indicating Demjanjuk was in the Nazi's SS paramilitary group, which ran concentration camps, was the key to his conviction by an Israeli court in 1988 for his crimes at a different death camp, Treblinka. But the Israeli Supreme Court freed him in 1993 over concern that the certificate might have been a Soviet forgery.

The certificate contains Demjanjuk's photograph, an SS service number and notes of his service at two Nazi sites.

After he was returned to the United States, Washington worked to remove his citizenship, but could not find another country to take him and prosecute him.

In December, Eli Rosenbaum, the director of the US Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, told the German news magazine Spiegel that Demjanjuk could be deported to face trial in Germany within 48 hours if the German government issued travel papers for him.

Slow movement in the case has caused tempers to flare in Germany. Last month, Germany's war crimes prosecutor Kurt Schrimm issued an impassioned warning against delays in bringing Demjanjuk to trial. He rejected claims by local German prosecutors that the case was incomplete.

"The world can't wait. Demjanjuk is old. Every day counts now," Schrimm said. "The evidence we have sent to Munich suffices."

The Schrimm team found a Sobibor witness and obtained expert evidence that Demjanjuk's Nazi identity card was genuine and had not been tampered with by Soviet authorities.

However, Munich justice officials initiated a new forensic study at the Bavarian police laboratories into the SS identity card. (dpa)