Croatian actor Ljubomir Jurkovic has accepted libel damages from British newspaper The Independent after it used his photograph to illustrate an article on the death of a Nazi war criminal, British media reported on Friday.
The Independent ran an article in November 2010 on Samuel Kunz, a guard at the Belzec concentration camp in Poland, who was held responsible for the deaths of 430,000 Jews, but mistakenly used a photograph of 52-year-old Jurkovic taken from the film The Living and the Dead in which he played a Croatian Ustasha soldier.
Jurkovic sued the paper and won the case at the London High Court. His lawyer, Christina Michalos, said that the error had caused him distress and humiliation.
"I wish to make it expressly clear that the claimant has never committed war crimes, whether during World War II or during the Bosnian war, and has no connection of any kind with such activities and does not subscribe to any form of Nazi ideology," the lawyer said.
Matthew Nicklin, counsel for Independent Print Limited, which will pay the damages, apologised for the "extremely regrettable mistake".
