US President George W. Bush signed a bill on Friday to extend the mandate of a government group by two years to declassify papers about former Nazi war criminals employed by the Central Intelligence Agency after the Second World War.

Bush signed the bill, which was passed by the House earlier this month and by the Senate in February, at his Crawford ranch, Texas.

The measure extends the life of the Nazi War Crimes and the Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, set up in 1998, to March 2007 to make the documents public. The group was to disband at the end of this month.

A 1998 public disclosure law required the US government to release all papers related to the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes, and so far more than 8 million pages of documents, including 1.25 million pages from the CIA, have been declassified.

The documents revealed for the first time that the CIA hired former Nazi officials during the Cold War to get intelligence on the former Soviet Union.

The CIA had refused to release specific information on former Nazis it hired, before an agreement was reached last month.

Source: Xinhua