Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in 1990 sent the New Zealand government the names of 46 suspected Nazi war criminals living in this country.

But after a police inquiry, the National government decided in 1992 there was not enough evidence to bring a prosecution.

The centre now runs Operation Last Chance, which offers a $US10,000 ($15,000) reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of war criminals.

"We think if it's OK for America to offer $25 million for Osama bin Laden, it's all right to offer $10,000 for a Nazi war criminal," Zuroff said last week from Melbourne, where he had been publicising two Australian cases.

Operation Last Chance, started in 2002, threw up the name of Karoly Zentai, a Hungarian in Perth who is fighting extradition to Hungary to face accusations of murdering a Jewish teenager in 1944.

In August last year, Australian Labor MP Michael Danby raised the case of Melbourne resident Lajos Polgar, who was part of the fascist Arrow Cross movement in that tortured and killed Jews in war-time Hungary.

Operation Last Chance "might also lead to the uncovering of Nazi war criminals in New Zealand," says Zuroff, who has not visited the country before.

The 1990 lists included a Lithuanian man in Auckland who was in the 15th Lithuanian Police Battalion, which massacred Jews in in 1941. He died in 1994, but Zuroff said the case should be investigated. "The man belonged to a murder squad, for heaven's sake."

Fairfax New Zealand Ltd, 19.02.2006