Munich - No date for the German trial of 89-year-old alleged Nazi death-camp murderer John Demjanjuk will be set before the end of August, judicial sources said Tuesday. The trial will now likely not take place before October, at least five months after the ailing Ukrainian-born former US auto worker arrived on a stretcher at Munich airport in May. He had been expelled by the US.
The case is likely to be Germany's last major World War II war crimes trial.
On July 13 Demjanjuk was formally indicted as an accessory to 27,900 Holocaust murders at a Nazi death camp at Soribor in occupied Poland during 1943.
Press spokesmen for the Munich Higher Regional Court would not give any further details Tuesday about why the high-profile case was taking so long to come to court.
Demjanjuk's Munich lawyer, Guenther Maull, has previously said that he does not expect the trial to commence before the end of September. Earlier in July Demjanjuk was pronounced fit to stand trial despite his infirmity, although it was decided that he should not endure more than two sessions of 90 minutes each in court each day.
Charlotte Knobloch, president of the German Central Council of Jews, said in May that putting him on trial would now be "a race against time."
