World Report

MOSCOW (JTA) -- Russian police and security officials this week defused a bomb discovered at the Shalom Jewish Theater in Moscow.

The device, which was found Tuesday, contained more than one pound of explosives and a timing mechanism. Had it gone off it could have caused massive damage, police said.

The bomb was found less than three weeks after two bombs went off near Moscow's two largest synagogues. Police said there could be a link between the three events.

Nazi war criminal expelled from U.S.

BERLIN (JTA) -- A member of a Nazi-sponsored unit that murdered thousands of Jews and others during the war was expelled permanently from the United States last week.

Kazys Ciurinskas, 81, who lived in Crown Point, Ind., left the country by plane from Chicago on his way to Lithuania, the Justice Department announced.

In mid-April, an immigration judge in Chicago ordered Ciurinskas removed from this country after he admitted participating in wartime atrocities.

Chase Manhattan, Jews reach pact

PARIS (JTA) -- Chase Manhattan Bank and Jewish groups reached an agreement last Friday aimed at settling charges that two of the bank's branch offices in France froze Jews' wartime accounts before the Nazis ordered them to do so.

The agreement calls for an independent probe of the branches' conduct and possible payments to former Chase customers.

Catholics set up chapel at Auschwitz

WARSAW (JTA) -- A wooden hut set up near the former Auschwitz death camp to protest government plans for removing hundreds of crosses from the site was consecrated as a chapel Sunday.

Church officials refused to approve the chapel put up by Kazimierz Switon, the militant who initiated the cross-planting campaign last August.

The Polish government recently passed a law that will enable it to remove the crosses.

Germany plans hate-site initiative

BERLIN (JTA) -- German police are developing a search engine that will help them find those responsible for creating illegal Internet sites, including those spreading neo-Nazi propaganda, a German government official said Monday.

Speaking at a conference on Internet security in Bonn, the official gave no indication when the engine would start functioning.

German firm sued over slave labor

BERLIN (JTA) -- Lawyers for Holocaust victims have filed a lawsuit against German clothing maker Hugo Boss for its use of slave laborers during World War II.

Allegations against the company, which made uniforms for the Hitler Youth and the German Army during the war, first surfaced in 1997. The suit, filed on Thursday of last week in a U.S. District Court in New Jersey, also named several new companies that have not been targeted by previous similar lawsuits.