"This evening I told Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic to urgently request the extradition of three Nazi war criminals so that they can be put on trial in Belgrade," Efraim Zuroff told French news agency AFP on Sunday after meeting Draskovic in Jerusalem.
"The Serbian minister promised to pass on my request and do all in his power to raise those issues," he added.
Zuroff named the three men as Ustasha commanders Ivo Rojnica and Milivoj Asner and Hungarian Sandor Kepiro.
Zuroff made his first appeal to Serbia three months ago during a visit to Belgrade. "Since the Serbs were also victims, Serbia has the right to demand that they be tried in Belgrade even though they are nationals of other countries," Zuroff said at the time, noting that Serbia could also do it as one of the successors to the former Yugoslavia, which had declared them war criminals.
Asner, former chief of police in Pozega, about 150 kilometres east of Zagreb, currently lives in Klagenfurt, Austria, while Rojnica, former Ustasha commander in Dubrovnik, lives in Buenos Aires. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre accused them of the deaths of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma.
Kepiro, a former Hungarian police captain, is held responsible for the deaths of a thousand civilians in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad in 1942. He lives in Budapest.
In September 2005, Croatia asked Austria to extradite Asner, but its request was turned down because under Austrian law Austrian nationals cannot be extradited to other countries.
In February 2006, Austrian authorities said that Asner had automatically lost his Austrian citizenship after receiving Croatian citizenship and his case was referred to a district court in Carinthia.
Zuroff has lodged an official protest with the Austrian authorities over the lack of progress in Asner's extradition to Croatia.
During his visit to Belgrade in August, Zuroff also said he had handed over extensive documentation on the Rojnica case to Croatian Chief Public Prosecutor Mladen Bajic, but that no steps had been taken towards his extradition.