Former Celtic Player Denies Father Guilty of War Crimes

www.theherald.co.uk
April 7, 2008

A FORMER Celtic player believes his father was wrongly accused of being a Nazi collaborator responsible for the deaths of 180 people.

Johannes Edvaldsson, from Reykjavik, Iceland, who played for the Hoops in the 1970s, told a Sunday newspaper that his father, Evald Mikson, was pursued by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights organisation, over the allegations.

Now 58 and living in Linwood, Renfrewshire, Edvaldsson denounced the claims as lies and said that the controversy centred on his father's role as deputy head of police in Nazi-occupied Tallinn, Estonia, during the Second World War.

It was alleged that he became a collaborator who murdered 30 people, and was responsible for the deaths of 150 more.

But Edvaldsson told the newspaper that his father, who fled to Iceland following the Second World War, was instead a freedom fighter.

He added: "All the old Nazis were gone, but this Wiesenthal organisation had to make a living. It was rubbish. It killed him in the end."

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