BERLIN - A decades-long hunt for Aribert Heim, a Nazi concentration camp doctor, has officially come to a close, German authorities said Friday, after they determined that the man known as Dr. Death for his unnecessary operations had died in Egypt in 1992.

A regional court in Baden-Baden, Heim's last known residence in Germany, said it had suspended the criminal investigation because "no doubts remained" that the fugitive had died of cancer in Cairo in 1992.

The New York Times and the German television station ZDF reported in 2009 that Heim had escaped justice by hiding in North Africa. Investigators later found witnesses who said he had died after a long struggle with rectal cancer. At the same time, they said he had been buried in a common grave, meaning that nearly 20 years after his death, neither DNA nor dental records could be used to confirm his death.

Egypt produced a death certificate in the name of Tarek Hussein Farid, which witnesses said was the name Heim took after becoming a Muslim.

The court also questioned Heim's son Ruediger Heim, who said he was in Cairo when his father died.

Austrian by birth, Aribert Heim was a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS and worked at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps. He was held as a POW by U.S. authorities and detained for more than two years, but was ultimately released.

Heim married, had two sons and a gynecology practice in the spa town of Baden-Baden, in southwest Germany. His time at Mauthausen came back to haunt him after former inmates told the police that he had killed healthy prisoners in senseless operations and murdered others with lethal injections to the heart.

He fled Baden-Baden in 1962 with investigators at his heels. He moved to Egypt in 1963, slowly integrating into the local culture and learning Arabic.

NEW YORK TIMES