The Budapest prosecutor's office has filed charges against Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian gendarme, for WWII war crimes, the spokesman of the office said on Monday.

Kepiro, who will turn 97 this week, is accused of having ordered his patrol to shoot civilians to death between January 21 and 23, 1942, during what had gone down to history as "the massacre of Novi Sad".

Hungarian forces rounded up over 1,000 people, mainly Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, in the city and mowed them down with machine-gun fire on the shores of the Danube.

Kepiro, who was convicted in 1944 for a mass murder of civilians, escaped to Argentina after the war but was exposed by the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre as living in Budapest in 2006. He is on the Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted Nazis. Kepiro denies the charge, saying he has never killed anyone. If convicted, he can get life imprisonment.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre welcomed Kepiro's indictment, calling it a "powerful message that the passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers and that old age should not protect those who committed such heinous crimes."

Efraim Zuroff, head of the centre, said, "For the past more than four years, I have waited for this news and now we finally can see the light at the end of the tunnel."

The measure was also welcomed by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities.

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