In September last year, 92-year-old Sandor Kepiro arrived home from his doctor to his pleasant two-roomed apartment in Budapest. Outside the building, across the street from a restored synagogue and Jewish community centre, was a throng of newspaper and television journalists. Each was eager to ask him questions about his time in the Hungarian gendarmerie. The past, it seemed, had finally caught up with this elderly, former police captain.
Kepiro had just been identified by Dr Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, as a Nazi war criminal. Documents they had uncovered showed he was a junior officer who had previously been found guilty of participating in one of the worst atrocities committed by Hungarian forces during the Second World War.
According to the SWC, Kepiro was said to have been convicted twice – in 1944 and 1946 – for his role in the Novi Sad massacre in northern Serbia in January 1942, in which more than 1000 people, mostly Jews, were killed over the course of three days.
While a stunned Kepiro fielded questions from journalists and denied any involvement in the killings or orders to shoot, he perhaps wondered how, after more than 60 years of relative obscurity, his cloak of anonymity had so suddenly slipped. Unbeknown to him in the end it was a single, grainy photograph discovered last year on the wall of a house in Scotland that led reporters to his door.
The trail to Budapest, via Los Angeles and Jerusalem, began in February 2005. A man living in Scotland, who wishes to remain anonymous, gave information to the SWC in LA, concerning a Hungarian now residing in Scotland who allegedly told of his knowledge of mass deportations of Jews during the Second World War. The man, it later turned out, was formerly under the command of Kepiro, having also served in the Hungarian gendarmerie during the war.
The information signalled one of the most significant developments in the hunt for war criminals since 2001 when Edinburgh-based Anton Gecas died in Scotland as Lithuanian prosecutors attempted to extradite him to face trial. Gecas was accused of killing more than 30,000 mostly Jewish civilians during the Second World War. Gecas's Nazi links had been known to the UK authorities since the mid-1980s. More recently, information obtained by The Herald shows that a detailed dossier was submitted to the War Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police in November last year. This new information suggests up to 41, mostly German, ex-members of the Waffen SS may be resident in the UK. The Herald understands that five of these may be living in Scotland.
The Hungarian man, now in his eighties, arrived in Scotland in the late 1940s from his Hungarian homeland after answering a call from the British Ministry of Labour to start a new life. He married a local girl, settled and started a family. The Hungarian community in Scotland has been a well established one over many years since Lajos Kossuth, the governor of Hungary during its fight for independence from Austria, visited Scotland more than 150 years ago. This quiet old man, who can sometimes be seen strolling around the village where he lives, was a former master-sergeant in the Hungarian gendarmerie during the Second World War.
Last year I visited his home. On the wall of a small office he displayed various photographs, newsletters and cuttings related to his "homeland". One of the photographs was a black-and-white image of a young man in uniform, with two medals across his chest. His black hair was combed back and he stared, unwaveringly, into the camera. The old man mentioned his name – Sandor Kepiro. The name meant little and our conversation quickly changed. Later, asked if Kepiro was still alive, he replied: "Yes. He was in Argentina for many years. Now he is in Budapest."
Argentina has long had a reputation as a refuge for fugitive Nazi leaders, SS officers and others, making it the target of international condemnation. The capture of Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann outside Buenos Aires by Israeli Mossad intelligence agents in
1961 was an embarrassment for Argentina. Eichmann was subsequently hanged in Israel for crimes against the Jewish people. I passed the information about Kepiro to Dr Zuroff, the leading hunter of Nazi war criminals in the world today, in Jerusalem. Bursting with excitement, a few days later he called back. The SWC had uncovered a 75-page wartime court verdict. Until this point Zuroff had no idea Kepiro was still alive.
Zuroff also revealed that Kepiro, who was convicted both in person, in 1944, and in absentia, in 1946, had been living undisturbed in the Hungarian capital for a decade, following almost half a century in hiding in Argentina.
Several Hungarian army and gendarmerie officers were prosecuted at the time.
According to Zuroff, Kepiro is "the most prominent unpunished Hungarian war criminal still alive today". According to his 1944 verdict, Kepiro demanded "orders in writing" when instructed to round up Jews, Serbs and Gypsies to be killed in Novi Sad, but carried out the assignment anyway when told that such an order could only be relayed verbally. Zuroff subsequently called for his immediate arrest and imprisonment before making plans to hold a press conference outside Kepiro's home in Budapest.
When I returned to the old man's house to see if he could provide any more information, he admitted he had served under Kepiro, but insisted this was after the massacre had occurred. When the Germans occupied Hungary, he said, he was detailed for "traffic control". He also denied Kepiro was a war criminal. Following the end of the Second World War, the two men went their separate ways, having fled initially to Austria together. In January 2002 the man in Scotland received correspondence from Kepiro. A translated copy of the letter concedes that the two men have grown old and
been through a lot. "But we have survived and remained what we were: we have never forgotten our Hungarian Fatherland and the gendarmerie."
In the letter Kepiro, who held a doctorate degree in law when he volunteered to join the Hungarian gendarmerie, admits he returned to Hungary in 1996 because he could not get used to dishonour in Argentina. He arrived in Argentina in August, 1948, and soon had a weaving business. His business prospered but his marriage "spoiled the lot". He owns, he says, 55 acres of good farmland in Sarkad, Hungary. "We were all stripped by the Communist government because of me. Now, thank God, I have no financial problems." Kepiro, despite his past crimes, visited Scotland in June 2003.
Crucially, with the letter he enclosed a photograph. It was to prove his undoing. The image was of a young man in uniform, with two medals on his chest. The old man kept it and pinned it on a wall of his office in Scotland. In September last year the image, taken more than 60 years ago, finally came back to haunt Kepiro.
Speaking from Jerusalem this week Dr Efraim Zuroff said: "We could not have got Kepiro without the Scottish connection. It was absolutely critical. But the hunt goes on."
Dr Stephen Ankier, a leading Holocaust researcher in the UK, describes it as "scandalous" that Kepiro visited the UK in 2003. "This suggests," he said, "that the 'watch-list' system that was supposed to have been put in place after Konrad Kalejs came and went from the UK, for his own health, has not worked."
Konrad Kalejs was an alleged Nazi war criminal who used his Australian citizenship and wealth to evade attempts to prosecute him in Britain, the US, Canada and Australia. He died in 2001 aged 88.
Sandor Kepiro has not been arrested in Hungary. A spokesman for the military prosecutor in Budapest has stated that his previous convictions were no longer valid and that it would be up to the civilian courts to start a new evidence.
The 1944 conviction was for "embarrassing the state", not for crimes against humanity, and so is subject to a statute of limitations. The 1946 conviction was for mass murder, but because the trial was in absentia, Hungarian law requires a retrial.
The old man in Scotland, meanwhile, still denies Kepiro was a war criminal but says this: "The Hungarians had to co-operate with the Germans and they gave the orders, you see. You are not thinking then the same way as you're thinking just now. It was a long time ago."
Kepiro would not answer my calls when I telephoned him in Budapest. But he is still seen from time to time, enjoying his last few years, outside his house across the street from the restored synagogue, which enjoys the views of the spectacular Buda Hills.

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