The Russian side will make efforts to try to find the exact place of the burial of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Minister of Justice of Russia Sergei Stepashin, currently in Sweden within the framework of President Boris Yeltsin's state visit to this country, told a news conference here on Thursday.

According to Stepashin, "there are three or four places where it is possible either to find Wallenberg's remains or establish exact places where he could be buried."

Sergei Stepashin met on Thursday with Wallenberg's half- brother Guy von Dardel and his niece, Nina Lagergren.

The minister of justice said new efforts would be made to determine Wallenberg's fate, including to hold talks with those persons who could communicate with the Swedish diplomat during his prison detention.

At the same time Stepashin stressed that no new documents concerning Wallenberg's case had been discovered in the Russian archives. "If they had been found we would have handed them to Sweden," the Russian minister assured journalists stressing that one should not rule out the possibility that the further searches would yield some results.

Asked if he thought the truth would ever be known, he replied: "Yes, I think so," noting that Russia would not close the case of Raoul Wallenberg "until his remains are returned to Sweden."

The fate of Wallenberg has been an object of a special interest to the Swedish public and politicians.

Raoul Wallenberg disappeared in 1945 in Hungary after saving thousands of Jews from Nazi death camps. He was arrested by the Soviet counterintelligence service in the Hungarian town of Debrecen on January 17, 1945 at the age of 32.

Later he was transported to Moscow and died, as it was reported to the Swedish side, two years later on July 17, 1947 allegedly of a "heart attack" at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov stated at a news conference in Stockholm on Wednesday that "practically all documents and archives' materials were studied, which could throw light on the fate of the disappeared Swedish diplomat. After 1947 Wallenberg was not reported alive. We have no grounds to believe that it was not so."

Sergei Stepashin said Russia and Wallenberg's family had agreed to continue their efforts to determine "exactly when and where he died and where his remains could be."

The minister emphasised that Russian representatives had agreed to meet again with one of the last known people to see Wallenberg alive, an interrogator at the Soviet headquarters in Debrecen.

For a long time all information about Wallenberg was kept secret, and only in the 1980s-1990s some concrete data appeared.

The joint Russian-Swedish group of experts for ascertaining Wallenberg's fate has been working. Its activities rely on support by President Boris Yeltsin, whom Swedish Premier Goeran Persson thanked during their talks in Stockholm for the efforts to determine Wallenberg's destiny.

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