BUDAPEST — A 97-year-old Hungarian, until recently the world’s most wanted Nazi
war crimes suspect, went free from court Monday after being
cleared of ordering the execution of over 30 Jews and Serbs
in 1942.
The prosecution had demanded at least a prison sentence for Sandor Kepiro, who
until his arrest topped the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre’s list of most wanted Nazi criminals.
But
the defence insisted there was no tangible
evidence that Kepiro had carried out war crimes.
The
Wiesenthal Centre denounced the court’s decision
as a “scandal.”
“Today’s
verdict is laughing in the face of at least
1,246 victims of the raid in Novi Sad,” said
the centre’s director, Efraim Zuroff, who
left the courtroom right after the verdict.
A one-time
Hungarian gendarmerie captain, Mr. Kepiro
faced a life sentence for his alleged participation
in a raid by Hungarian forces — then allied
to Nazi Germany — in the now Serbian town
of Novi Sad on January 21-23, 1942, in which
more than 1,200 Jews and Serbs were murdered.
Mr.
Kepiro was accused of ordering the round-up
and execution of some 36 Jews and Serbs as
head of one of the patrols in the raid.
Mr.
Zuroff hinted the legal battle was not yet
over.
“We
have been informed by the prosecutor that
there would be an appeal against this ruling,”
he told AFP.
There
was no official word from the prosecutor,
however.
The
prosecution’s case rested heavily on old testimonies
and verdicts from previous trials in the 1940s.
“There
are cases where there is no access to direct
evidence as the direct witnesses are no longer
alive,” prosecutor Zsolt Falvai acknowledged
Monday.
“We
are obliged to base our case on written proof,
documents, even if these are old testimonies.”
During
the trial, however, several experts cast doubts
on the authenticity of these documents, many
of which were incomplete or contained translation
mistakes.
The
defence also noted that testimonies made in
front of communist courts could have been
coerced.
In his
reasoning after the verdict, Judge Bela Varga
dismissed the court documents from 1944 as
“absurd and nonsense,” as Mr. Kepiro had then
been judged on collective charges.
The
reasoning was read out in court for two hours
and the reading was to continue on Tuesday,
albeit without Mr. Kepiro whose presence was
no longer needed as he has been found not
guilty, Varga said.
Mr.
Kepiro, who appeared in court on Monday but
looked unwell, insisted in a last statement
before the verdict was read out: “I am innocent,
I never killed, I never robbed.”
Noticeably
tired, he was allowed to leave the court after
the verdict, and was returned to hospital,
where he has spent the last week due to health
problems.
Although
extremely frail, Mr. Kepiro was repeatedly
deemed mentally fit to stand trial and attended
all the proceedings, equipped with headphones
due to his poor hearing.
The
trial, which started on May 5, moved along
slowly as the judge limited daily proceedings
to two 45-minute sessions to accommodate Mr.
Kepiro.
The
costs of the trial — around US$20,600 — will
be covered by the state, Varga also said Monday.
Mr.
Kepiro was found guilty of the crimes in Novi
Sad twice: first in 1944, when he was sentenced
to 10 years in prison, a sentence that was
quashed a few months later; and then again
when he was sentenced in absentia to 14 years’
imprisonment in 1946, this time under communist
rule.
He avoided
prison by fleeing to Argentina in 1944, where
he remained for half a century before returning
to Budapest in 1996. Nazi hunter Mr. Zuroff
tracked him down there 10 years later.
With
proceedings against another Nazi war criminal,
Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, closed in Germany
in May, Mr. Zuroff has predicted that the
Kepiro trial could be one of the last of its
kind.
nationalpost.com
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