A US court has granted a stay of deportation against John Demjanjuk, a man accused of war crimes in the Second World War.

The stay was granted after Demjanjuk was taken from his house by officers of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.

His lawyer and his son said the US authorities wanted to place him on a plane bound for Germany, where he is to be tried for the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

In 1981, Mr Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship after a federal court found him guilty of being the guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and convicted of crimes against humanity.

In 1993, however, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence from KGB files contradicted testimony from the camp's survivors. He then returned to the US and regained his citizenship in 1998, only to be stripped of it again in 2002 after a judge ruled there was proof he worked at several Nazi concentration camps.

In March of this year, a German court issued a warrant for his arrest.