(JTA) -- Nazi hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff was acquitted by a
Budapest court of libel charges leveled against him by
an accused Hungarian Nazi war criminal.
Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was acquitted Tuesday by Judge Viktor
Vadasz two days before his accuser, Dr. Sandor
Kepiro, is scheduled to go on trial in Budapest
Municipal Court. Kepiro is charged with being
involved in the murder of more than1,200 Jews,
Serbs and Gypsies during a raid by the wartime
Hungarian Gendarmerie at Novi Sad in 1942.
Kepiro,
97, filed suit after Zuroff, the head of the
Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
submitted documents to the Hungarian courts
in 2006 regarding Kepiro's alleged role in the
murders of 1,246 civilians in Novi Sad. Most
of the victims were taken to the Danube River
and shot in January 1943.
Kepiro was
found guilty of involvement twice -- once by
the pre-Nazi Hungarian courts, and again after
the war, in 1946. By then he allegedly had fled
via Austria to Argentina. He returned to Budapest
in 1996, and Zuroff, who has been searching
for Nazi war criminals under the Wiesenthal
Center's Operation Last Chance program, located
him.
In his verdict,
Vadasz noted that Zuroff had acted in good faith
by first contacting the Hungarian prosecutors
after discovering that Kepiro had returned to
Hungary from Argentina before notifying the
media.
"Needless
to say, I am relieved to have been acquitted,
but the most important issue is Kepiro’s guilt,
which will be hopefully established by a criminal
court in his trial which begins Thursday morning," Zuroff said in a statement. "This has been a long and frustrating process, which began in the summer of 2006,
but I am hopeful that justice will finally be
achieved. That is what the victims of the massacre
in Novi Sad deserve and that is what I have
been fighting for from the very beginning of
this process."
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