Bangalore, June 29: An 88-year-old European trying to sell a stolen 18th-century piano in Goa has turned out to be a Nazi war criminal on the run.

Johann Bach, who allegedly oversaw the killing of 12,000 Jews, was arrested on Friday night after he tried to shake off Indian and German sleuths by getting off his taxi and walking into a forest on the Goa-Karnataka border.

Bach, said to have been a senior adjutant in a Nazi concentration camp in Berlin, had fled Germany after World War II and settled in Argentina. After living there for over four decades, he had moved to Canada and then Bulgaria before settling down in Goa two years ago, Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials said. He may have also spent some time in Yemen, other sources claimed.

The German Chancellor’s corps office in Berlin, still hunting down Nazi war criminals, had contacted the IB saying it wanted to trace an Argentine passport holder who was trying to sell an antique piano in Goa.

Bach, who shares his name and surname with one of history’s greatest composers, had put out an Internet advertisement for the piano, stolen from a German museum during the war years.

Berlin also had information from Tel Aviv that an old German had bragged about overseeing the genocide of Jews to an Israeli tourist couple in Goa during a rave party a few months ago.

Goa’s beaches are frequented by young Israeli couples, most of them seeking leisure after a term of compulsory military service in their country. Bach, mistaking the couple for Americans, told them he had “managed” a Nazi concentration camp during the war.

The German authorities put two and two together when they realised that the museum from where the piano was stolen was located close to a concentration camp in Berlin. They already knew that the camp was run by a young man named Bach, who was never caught after the war.

A German intelligence team arrived in India and began a joint hunt with their Indian counterparts in Goa. On Friday, Bach smelt a rat and hired a taxi to take him to Belgaum in neighbo- uring Karnataka.

However, as he neared the inter-state border, Bach realised he was being followed. He got off his cab and slipped into the dense forests.

The sleuths caught up with the taxi and learnt that their man had got off. They found the 88-year-old floundering in the dark, thickly wooded forests of Anmod Ghat two hours later.

Sources said that after further investigations in Goa, proceedings would begin to take Bach to Germany, with whom India signed an extradition treaty in 2004.