Budapest - The trial of one of the Nazi-hunting Wiesenthal Center's last surviving and most wanted war crimes suspects from World War Two is due to begin in Hungary on Thursday.

The Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff revealed in 2006 that Sandor Kepiro had returned after decades in South America and was living in obscurity in the Hungarian capital.

Sandor Kepiro, now 97, is suspected of participating in the Novi Sad massacre of January 1942, in which Hungarian troops killed several thousand mainly Serbian and Jewish civilians in reprisals.

Kepiro, who served as a gendarme during the Second World War, had sued Zuroff of libel, but a Budapest court in a first verdict on Tuesday ruled in Zuroff's favour.

Pest Central District Court noted that Zuroff had come into possession of documents on a wartime ruling by a Hungarian court that convicted Kepiro for his role in the massacre.

Zuroff therefore 'had grounds and acted in good faith when he accused the former gendarmerie captain Sandor K. of war crimes,' the court said in a statement posted on its website.

However, the court did not examine the plaintiff's criminal responsibility for the events of 1942, which it noted 'is the subject of separate court proceedings.'

'Needless to say, I am relieved to have been acquitted,' Zuroff said in a statement posted on the Wiesenthal Center's website.

'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.'

Kepiro was sentenced to ten years in prison by a Hungarian court in 1944.

However, his conviction was quashed under the fascist regime backed by Nazi Germany that took control for the closing months of the Second World War.

He was again found guilty in absentia by another Hungarian court in 1946.

Budapest Investigating Prosecutor's office announced in February that Kepiro had been indicted for the murder of civilians in northern Serbia during the Second World War.

monstersandcritics.com