German prosecutors are asking for charges to be made against a guard who allegedly served at Auschwitz.

The 87-year-old, whose name has not yet been released, was accused on Wednesday of being an ex-SS Nazi who was involved in killing more than 344,000 Jews at the death camp.

Kurt Schrimm, head prosecutor, said that the man could face a criminal charge as an accessory to murder.

“I can’t say where he was in the camp, but all guards were stationed at times on the ramps, the gas chambers and the towers.”

Efraim Zuroff, a leading Nazi tracker at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said the potential case presented difficulties as the man is a non-German and does not live in the country.

“A lot will depend on whether or not his country of residence has the political will to extradite him to Germany,” he said after noting that Australia refused to extradite a 90-year-old man to face accusations of killing a Jewish teenager in Hungary during WW2.

The case has been transferred to prosecutors in Weiden, Bavaria, where a spokesman said it will be another month before a decision is made.

John Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in jail for being an accessory to the mass murder of more than 28,000 Jews in the Holocaust, as a former guard at Sobibor concentration camp.