A 97-year-old Hungarian accused of massacring civilians in
Serbia in 1942 has gone on trial in Hungary.
Sandor Kepiro was listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as the world's most wanted
Nazi war crimes suspect.
More than
1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered
over three days by Hungarian forces in a notorious
massacre in the city of Novi Sad.
As Mr Kepiro
arrived at court he told reporters he was "completely innocent" and called the trial a "circus".
After using
a walking stick on his way into the court in
Budapest, he took his seat and displayed a printed
sheet of paper stating: "Murderers of a 97-year-old man!"
The former
police captain is accused of "complicity in war crimes".
Prosecutor
Zsolt Falvai detailed the charges. He said Mr
Kepiro was directly responsible for the death
of 36 Jews and Serbs - including 30 who were
put on a lorry on the defendant's orders and
taken away and shot.
Mr Kepiro
denied the charges. He said that, in fact, he
had been "the only person to refuse the order to use firearms", and that he had intervened to save five people about to be killed by a corporal.
'No clemency'
Hundreds of families were rounded up by the
Hungarians, allies of Nazi Germany, in January
1942 on the banks of the Danube River in Novi
Sad and then shot.
Sandor Kepiro
was convicted of involvement in the killings
in Hungary in 1944 but his conviction was quashed
by the fascist government and he later fled
to Argentina.
He returned
to Hungary in 1996 and was tracked down by the
Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center a decade
later to a flat opposite a synagogue in Budapest.
Mr Kepiro
had sued the director of the Center, Efraim
Zuroff, for defamation. But that case was dismissed
on Tuesday. The Budapest tribunal said Mr Zuroff
had the right to call him a war criminal because
of the 1944 verdict.
On Thursday
Mr Zuroff said it was imperative that Nazis
were brought to justice.
"There
can be no clemency, no sympathy and no ignoring
of the facts," he said.
bbc.co.uk
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