Some 50 years after he was shot by Stalin's secret police, Russia yesterday "rehabilitated" Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from Nazi death camps.
Russian prosecutors have ruled that Wallenberg was a victim of political repression by the Soviet authorities, a spokesman, Mr Vasily Glushenko, said.
Wallenberg was seized by Soviet agents at the end of the second World War. A Russian investigating body acknowledged last month for the first time that he had been executed by Soviet secret services in 1947, aged 34. His driver, Vilmus Langfelder, who was taken together with Wallenberg and later shot dead, has also been rehabilitated, the general prosecutor's office said.
"By decision of extra-judicial Soviet organs [Wallenberg and Langfelder] were arrested without foundation and deprived of their freedom for political reasons as representing a danger for society, without being accused of a specific crime," a prosecutor's statement said.
The decision was taken in line with a 1991 law "on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression".
Sweden reacted cautiously yesterday to the news. "We have received this information through our embassy and also through mass media," a Swedish Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Ms Ingrid Iremark, said in Stockholm.
"We note that Russian authorities note that Wallenberg was innocent and that he had diplomatic immunity when he disappeared. We also note that there is still no clarification of the circumstances surrounding his fate," Ms Iremark said.
Wallenberg was arrested in January 1945 and imprisoned for more than 21/2 years before being killed. He was working as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, then occupied by the Wehrmacht, when he managed to rescue thousands of Jews destined for Nazi death camps.
Wallenberg provided Jews with Swedish passports, paid off Hungarian fascists and Nazis, and associated with German SS officers. But Soviet officials in Budapest became suspicious of the diplomat's links with the US. He was last seen by colleagues on January 17th, 1945, as he set off to a meeting with a Soviet armed forces commander who took control in Budapest after the Nazi retreat. According to the official Soviet version from 1957, Wallenberg died of a heart attack on July 17th, 1947, at the KGB's headquarters in Moscow.