BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — A former Hungarian military officer
has been charged with war crimes in the 1942 slaughter
of 1,200 civilians in Serbia, prosecutors said Monday.
The charges against Sandor Kepiro, 96, stem from his alleged participation in
a raid by Hungarian forces on the northern Serbian
town of Novi Sad in January 1942 that left more
than 1,200 civilians dead, the Budapest Investigating
Prosecutor's Office said.
Kepiro, who
was at the top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
most-wanted war criminals list, returned to Hungary
in 1996 after living for decades in Argentina.
Hungarian authorities reopened Kepiro's case
after his whereabouts were uncovered in 2006
by Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief
Nazi hunter.
"I
am innocent and need to be acquitted," Kepiro told The Associated Press by phone from his apartment in Budapest. "I am bedridden and can't leave my home. I have nothing."
Kepiro, who
turns 97 on Friday, said he wants to return to
his family in Argentina and stay there at a nursing
home.
Most of those
killed in the raids in the wake of the Nazi occupation
of Yugoslavia in World War II were Jews, Serbs
and Gypsies, also known as Roma. Some 550,000
Hungarian Jews and 50,000 Roma died in the Holocaust.
Hungary joined
the Axis powers after the start of the war but
was occupied by Germany in 1944 after attempting
peace talks with the Allied powers.
Kepiro's was
discovered as part of Operation Last Chance —
a campaign led by Zuroff to locate and prosecute
Holocaust war criminals before they die.
"It
has been an uphill battle to convince Hungarian
authorities to bring him to justice," Zuroff told the AP from Jerusalem. "But this is a powerful message that you can still be held accountable even for
crimes committed decades ago."
Kepiro said
his task in Novi Sad was to supervise the identities
of those being rounded up, but he denied knowing
about the killings until after they were carried
out. The bodies were dumped into the Danube River.
In 1944, Kepiro
was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a military
court for charges stemming from the Novi Sad
raids, but the verdict was later annulled in
a retrial. Kepiro, at the time a gendarmerie
captain, said he was a scapegoat in a show trial
meant to exonerate his superiors.
According
to Zuroff, Kepiro was convicted again in 1946
for his role in the raids, but Hungarian prosecutors
have not been able to find records of the trial.
Hungarian
officials, however, did find new documents recently
in archives in Belgrade, the Serbian capital,
and used those to prepare the current charges
against Kepiro, said Gabriella Skoda, a spokeswoman
for the Prosecutor's Office.
In 2009, a
Budapest court denied the prosecution's request
for Kepiro to be banned from leaving his home
and Skoda said Monday that no similar appeals
were planned now.
Kepiro's lawyer
said he would ask the courts to postpone a defamation
suit launched last year by Kepiro against Zuroff,
at least until the charges against his client
are settled.
"I
expect the independent Hungarian courts to exonerate
Sandor Kepiro," Zsolt Zetenyi said. "The documents are incapable of demonstrating his criminal responsibility and
I am convinced that he did not commit any war
crimes."
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