For Nazi hunter Ephraim Zuroff, it is the end of a long court battle - but
for Sandor Kepiro, Mr Zuroff's accuser in the libel stand-off
that ended this week, the beginning of another.
On Tuesday, a Budapest court acquitted Mr Zuroff, director of the Simon Weisenthal
Centre in Israel, of libel for describing
Sandor Kepiro, a former officer in the Hungarian
Gendarmerie, as a war criminal.
But
in a move that has baffled legal experts,
Kepiro was scheduled by Hungarian legal authorities
to face trial for war crimes in Budapest Municipal
Court on Thursday, just two days after the
conclusion of the libel case. David Allen
Green, media lawyer at Preiskel & Co, said: "It is unusual for any libel claim to precede a related criminal case."
Mr Kepiro,
97, who lives in Budapest opposite a synagogue,
faces charges of commanding a patrol whose
members killed four civilians in Novi Sad,
northern Serbia, in January 1942 after the
area was occupied by Hungary. Irene Weisz,
one of the victims, was shot in her bed, according
to court papers.
In 2006, Mr Zuroff submitted documents to the Hungarian courts regarding Kepiro's
alleged role in the murders of 1,246 civilians
in Novi Sad, which prompted Kepiro to sue
for libel.
Mr Zuroff said: "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."
Hundreds
of civilians, including Jews, Gypsies and
Serbs, were shot in the Novi Sad massacres,
which lasted for several days. Victims were
lined up on the bank of the Danube and shot.
The killings were halted only when senior
officers arrived from Budapest.
Mr Kepiro
was sentenced in 1944 to ten years for his
role in the massacre but the verdict was later
annulled. He denied any involvement and said
that his role was only to check the names
of the people being rounded up. He fled Hungary
for Argentina in 1945 and returned to Budapest
in 1996 when Mr Zuroff discovered his whereabouts.
The Hungarian authorities re-opened the case
after the Simon Weisenthal Centre put him
on top of its list of alleged Nazi war criminals.
Peter
Feldmajer, the president of the Hungarian
Jewish Community, accused the Hungarian authorities
of procrastination and delays. Documents from
1944 had been submitted to the Budapest prosecutor's
office in 2009. "Nobody wanted to work on this case. It is a scandal," he said.
Nazi
war criminals are still not being brought
to justice in nine countries, the Simon Weisenthal
Centre said. The centre's annual report on
efforts to track down perpetrators said that
Austria, Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Norway, Sweden, Syria and Ukraine were failing
in their duties. thejc.com
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