Budapest - The trial of Hungarian Nazi war crime suspect
Sandor Kepiro resumed on Thursday after physical and mental
health checks showed the 97-year-old was fit enough
to attend, even if extremely frail.
During the short hearing, Judge Bela Varga read out a statement dating back to
1948 by one of the soldiers - since deceased
- whom Kepiro allegedly ordered to round up
and shoot 30 people in the Serbian town of
Novi Sad in 1942.
Kepiro,
who appeared in court in a wheelchair, dismissed
the statement as a "blatant lie", insisted he did not know the solider, named as Janos Nagy, and again denied
any involvement in the killings.
Little
information is available about Nagy, other
than he was tried and sentenced to life for
murder by a communist court in 1948.
The
case against Kepiro rests almost exclusively
on such written statements by soldiers who
are now dead, as well as documents from a
trial in 1942 in which Kepiro was found guilty
in absentia.
Experts
have argued that there were numerous errors
and omissions in the translation of a number
of those court documents, thus casting doubt
on their reliability.
Deteriorating
mental state
The
Budapest court ruled that the latest trial
could be resumed after medical examinations
showed the defendant, while hard of hearing
and very frail, was in full possession of
his faculties.
"Sandor
Kepiro's mental state is not impaired and
he is able to understand and process information
from outside," judge Varga said.
"Nevertheless,
due to his advanced age, his mental state
deteriorates rapidly after two sessions of
45 minutes," Varga said.
There
would be three more days of hearings, with
the next one scheduled for May 24, with a
verdict expected on June 3, the judge explained.
Kepiro
turned up in court on Thursday in a wheelchair
and wearing a set of headphones that would
enable him to hear the proceedings clearly.
He answered
in the affirmative when the judge asked him
whether he was able to hear and understand
what had been said so far.
Facing
life sentence
Kepiro
- one of the last suspected Nazi war criminals
to go on trial - is being tried in connection
with a raid by Hungarian forces on Novi Sad
between January 21 and 23 1942, in which more
than 1 200 Jews and Serbs were murdered.
Specifically,
he is charged, as head of one of the patrols
involved in the raids, with having ordered
the rounding up and execution of 36 people.
If found
guilty, he could face a life sentence.
The
former Hungarian gendarmerie officer was formerly
number one on the list of wanted Nazi criminals
by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
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