published 16/10/2013 at 08:18 BST by Tom Kington in Rome
Former SS captain remains unburied after his lawyer says he cancelled service because police stopped family
entering church
Anti-fascist protesters shout as a police van carrying the coffin of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke in Albano Laziale, near Rome, drives off. Photograph: Reuters
The funeral in Italy of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke has been called off amid clashes outside the church
between sympathisers and anti-fascist protesters.
Priebke's lawyer, Paolo Giachini, said he had cancelled the service because police outside the church in Albano
Laziale near Rome had stopped friends and relatives of Priebke entering the church. The Italian news agency Ansa
reported that members of a far-right Italian political movement had been barred from entering by authorities.
Priebke, a former SS captain
who died in Rome last Friday aged 100 while serving a life sentence for his role in the massacre of 335 Italians in 1944, had been denied a church funeral in the Italian capital by the Catholic
church despite protests from his lawyer and family. But on Tuesday, the Society of Saint Pius
X, which has split from the Vatican over its opposition to the modernisation of Catholic doctrine and its outreach to Jews, offered Priebke a funeral at its church in Albano Laziale.
The group gained notoriety in 2009 when a British member, Richard Williamson, denied the Holocaust had
taken place, saying: "I believe there were no gas chambers."
As the hearse containing Priebke's remains tried to enter the church on Tuesday afternoon accompanied by a police
escort, protesters kicked it, yelled "assassin" and tried to attack a priest. Riot police separated the crowd from a small group of rightwing extremists, some hooded, who gave the fascist salute.
As the evening wore on, the opposing groups briefly clashed before police intervened.
Nicola Marini, the mayor of Albano Laziale, had tried to ban the coffin from entering the town for the funeral, which was taking place on the 70th anniversary of the Nazi roundup of Jews in Rome,
but he was overruled by the local government prefect.
After living in Argentina for 50 years after the war, Priebke was given a life sentence in Italy in 1998 for his
role in the 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine caves in Rome, a reprisal for the killing of 33
German soldiers by resistance fighters.
Given house arrest with permission to attend church, he outraged Jews in Rome, who would bump into him as he walked in a city park. Priebke admitted no guilt, insisting he had been following orders and, just before his death, claimed that the Holocaust
was an invention.
After the Vatican denied him a funeral in Rome, the capital's mayor also ruled out a burial in the capital. Argentina's foreign minister said Priebke could not be buried in Argentina, and a spokesman for the council of Priebke's home town, Hennigsdorf in Germany, said: "We don't have to bury Priebke in Hennigsdorf and we will not do it."
Mayor Marini said a burial there was also out of the question.
Cremation was the best solution, said Riccardo Pacifici, the president of Rome's Jewish community. "Spreading his ashes, like they did to Adolf Eichmann, would stop his grave becoming a pilgrimage destination."
After the cancelled funeral, Priebke's coffin remained in Albano Laziale overnight.