BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Hungarian state officials questioned and
confiscated the passport of an alleged Nazi collaborator.
Tuesday's questioning of Sandor Kepiro by the Hungarian State Prosecutor Service
may mark the start of the first major war crimes trial in
Hungary since the collapse of Soviet administration 20 years
ago.
Kepiro, 95, who has lived openly in
Hungary for the past three years, is accused by the Simon
Wiesenthal Center of involvement in the murder of some 1,200
Jews, Serbs and Gypsies by the wartime Hungarian Gendarmerie
at Novi Sad in 1942.
He was found guilty on charges arising
from the massacre shortly after the event by an independent
Hungarian court, but his sentence was quashed after the invasion
of the country by Nazi Germany in 1944.
Gabriella Skoda, a specialist spokesperson
for the prosecution service, said Tuesday that the files
are being reopened on the strength of fresh documentary evidence
supplied by Serbia.
As many as 20 important surviving
Nazi war criminals of Hungarian origin are still to be brought
to justice, according to Peter Feldmajer, chairman of the
Alliance of Hungarian Jewish Religious Communities.
After the World War II, Kepiro escaped
first to Austria and then Argentina, eventually returning
home on the assumption that his case would not be reopened
in the absence of fresh evidence. He now lives in an elegant
district of Buda across the street from a thriving synagogue.
Kepiro was discovered in Budapest
in 2006 by Ephraim Zuroff, the American-born Israeli historian,
Nazi hunter and director of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem.
Anxious to prosecute the case, the
city of Novi Sad has granted Zuroff honorary citizenship.
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