BERLIN — A court in Hungary on Monday acquitted a 97-year-old man accused of taking part in a massacre during World War II, Hungarian news reports said.

The court found that the man, Sandor Kepiro, was not guilty of war crimes charges in connection with the deaths of 36 people in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad in 1942. Mr. Kepiro had been convicted twice before of taking part in the massacre, known as the Racija, the Serbian word for raid.

Mr. Kepiro had previously acknowledged to reporters that he took part as a junior police officer in rounding up people before the massacre, but denied killing anyone or giving anyone the order to shoot victims. More than 1,200 civilians, mostly Jews but also Serbs and Roma, were killed and their bodies dumped in the icy waters of the Danube.

“The verdict flies in the face of all the evidence, all logic, and the understanding of events as they occurred,” said Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, speaking by telephone from Budapest, where he had gone to the courtroom for the reading of the verdict by the three-judge panel.

“It’s an outrage, this verdict; I’m in shock,” said Mr. Zuroff, adding that extreme-right supporters of Mr. Kepiro broke into applause at the announcement. “It’s a sad day for Hungary. It’s a sad day for the victims and for people who understand the importance of bringing such people to justice, even so many years after the crime.”

Mr. Kepiro’s cause had been taken up by the extreme right-wing party Jobbik after he was charged in February. Hungary has undergone a significant shift to the right in recent years. Just five years ago, Jobbik was viewed by political analysts here as a fringe movement that could never break through in national election, but it now holds seats in both the Parliament in Budapest and the European Parliament in Brussels.

The Wiesenthal Center, which helped reopen the case against Mr. Kepiro in 2006, had declared him the world’s most-wanted Nazi war criminal. But the case also underscores the difficulty that prosecutors have in winning convictions in World War II war-crimes cases so many years after they occurred.

Hungarian forces allied with the Germans occupied Novi Sad after the Nazis conquered Yugoslavia in 1941. Mr. Kepiro was convicted in 1944 for his role in the massacre and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was freed by the fascists not long after his trial. He was convicted a second time in absentia by the Communist government in 1946, after he fled to Argentina. He remained there until 1996, when he returned to Hungary.

In Germany, prosecutors in the Bavarian town of Weiden said Monday that they had opened a new investigation into John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker, this time into his alleged service as a guard at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The chief prosecutor in Weiden, Gerd Schäfer, said Monday that prosecutors were gathering information in the case. “At this stage we are still examining whether criminal charges can be brought,” Mr. Schäfer said.

Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted in May on more than 28,000 counts of accessory to murder after a Munich court determined that he had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. Mr. Demjanjuk is in a nursing home in Germany awaiting the result of his appeal.

nytimes.com