Stuttgart - A long-sought Nazi war criminal known as "Dr Death" is "presumedly dead," German police said Thursday, a day after two media outlets reported he died in Cairo 16 years ago.

A spokesman in the southern city of Stuttgart said police had "meaningful information" that Aribert Heim lived undetected in the Egyptian capital from 1963 and is buried there.

Germany's ZDF television channel and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the Austrian-born former concentration camp doctor died of cancer on August 10,
1992.

Heim was thought to have been living in South America, but there were also reports that he had sought sanctuary in Spain and Denmark after fleeing Germany in the early
1960s.

As an SS doctor in the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen, he is accused of killing and torturing hundreds of inmates by various methods, including lethal injections directly into the hearts of his victims.

Witnesses said he made a lampshade for a camp commander from the skin of one of his victims.

The police spokesman said German investigators did not have enough time to check fully the latest reports of his death.

He said German police also received reports in 1965 and 1967 that Heim was living in Cairo, but "investigations by Egyptian authorities did not confirm this."

News of Heim's death was viewed with reservation and suspicion in some quarters. "On the surface this appears to be serious, but the most important pieces of evidence are missing. There's no corpse, there's no grave and there are no DNA tests," said Ephraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.

Born in Austria in 1914, Heim practised as a gynaecologist in the German city of Baden-Baden after the war, before fleeing in 1962. An international arrest warrant for him was issued, with a reward of 400,000 dollars for information leading to his capture.

ZDF said Heim converted to Islam in the early 1980s and lived under the name Tarek Farid Hussein after that.

The television channel said it was in possession of a briefcase belonging to Heim that contained a copy of his Egyptian passport, applications for residence permits, bank statements, personal letters and medical documents.

The television channel said its findings were confirmed by various sources, including Heim's son, who lives in Baden-Baden.

The son said he visited his father for the first time in Cairo in the mid-1970s and looked after him for several months early 1990 after Heim underwent surgery for cancer.

Heim's son said he had confronted his father about the allegations against him, but he denied them. Egyptian friends, acquaintances and even the war criminal's doctor knew nothing about his true past.

The New York Times said Heim was a regular visitor to Cairo's al- Azhar mosque and often called in at a cafe in the centre of the city where he ordered chocolate cakes and bought sweets for his friends' children, who called him Uncle Tarek. (dpa)