BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Jewish officials are viewing the acquittal of accused war criminal
Sandor Kepiro in Hungary as an outrage and a betrayal.
Applause and cheers broke out in the courtroom Monday as Judge Bela Varga announced
the verdict. He finished reading the 90-page
verdict the next day.
On Tuesday,
Hungarian prosecutors said they would appeal
the verdict, calling it "unfounded" and "inconsistent."
Hungarian
prosecutors had charged Kepiro, a former World
War II gendarmerie officer, with involvement
in the killing of about 400 Jews and 800 Serbs
during an anti-partisan raid in the Serbian
city of Novi Sad, then under Hungarian control,
on Jan. 23, 1942. Kepiro, now 97, returned
to Hungary in 1996 from Argentina, where he
fled to after World War II.
"After
70 years there are no answers to many questions
that we want to know about those tragic events
in 1942,” Varga said Monday during the announcement
of the verdict, referring to "the unsatisfactory evidence of the prosecution in the case of Kepiro."
"We
just simply do not know who were those, who
gave the command to the people serving under
Kepiro," the judge said.
Kepiro
was "acquitted on insufficent evidence, and not on absence of crime,” Varga said Tuesday
when he finished reading his verdict.
Kepiro
also was suspected of being involved in and
responsible for the death of about 30 other
civilians who were executed on the banks of
the Danube River in Novi Sad, shot through
holes cut into the frozen river.
Kepiro
had been found guilty of involvement in the
massacre twice: once by the pre-Nazi Hungarian
courts in 1944, and again after the war, in
1946. By then he allegedly had fled via Austria
to Argentina. He returned to Budapest in 1996,
where he was located by Efraim Zuroff, head
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office.
Zuroff
has been searching for Nazi war criminals
under the center's Operation Last Chance program.
"This
is an absolutely outrageous verdict," he told JTA. "It flies in the face of all the evidence available. This verdict contradicts
what we know about the events in Novi Sad
on Jan. 23, 1942. It is an insult to the victims,
an insult to the Jewish community, to the
Serbian community, and it's a very sad day
for Hungary.”
Elan
Steinberg, vice president of the American
Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their
Descendants, said in a statement that "Holocaust survivors view this verdict as a betrayal by Hungarian judicial authorities
of the demands of justice and memory. Hungary
has turned its back on history in failing
to come to grips with its collaborationist
policies with the Nazi regime during World
War II.
"At
a time when extremist elements compromise
present day Hungarian politics, this verdict
is particularly unsettling."
jta.org
|