Nazi Hunter Questions Silence on Pan Am’s Bomb Warning

WASHINGTON —  Neal Sher, head of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, today questioned why the State Department didn’t alert all government agencies to a terrorist bomb warning before the crash of the Pan Am jumbo jet in Scotland.

Sher, director of the Office of Special Investigations, lost one of his aides in the crash, Michael Bernstein, who was returning from Austria after negotiating an agreement in which the Vienna government agreed to take back Josef Eckert, a former SS concentration camp guard living in La Puente, Calif.

The State Department said it issued a widespread alert about a bomb warning received Dec. 5 to airlines, airport security officials and U.S. embassies.

Asked whether the rest of the government should have been informed of the warning, which the State Department deemed serious enough to post on bulletin boards at embassies, Sher said he had just returned from abroad and would have flown on another airline “if I had known this threat was out there on Pan Am.”

“I’m very upset,” he said. “People in my office travel all over the world all the time.”