Hundreds of people have taken part in demonstrations in two Serbian cities against
the acquittal by a Hungarian court of an alleged World War
II criminal who was charged with involvement in operations
by pro-Nazi troops that left hundreds of Serbs, Jews and
other civilians dead.
The protests against the acquittal of Sandor Kepiro occurred June 24 in the Serbian
capital, Belgrade, and in the northern city
of Novi Sad. It was in Novi Sad in January,
1942, that more than 1,000 civilians were
massacred by pro-Nazi forces.
Last
week, a court in Budapest ruled that there
was not enough evidence to convict the 97-year-old
Kepiro, who served as a Hungarian gendarme
during the war, of involvement in more than
30 deaths.
Aleksandar
Veljic, director of the Association For The
Remembrance Of The Holocaust, said at the
demonstration in Novi Sad that the acquittal
was "shameful" and "in defiance of God's justice."
"We
have all relevant evidence that [Kepiro] participated
in genocide, commonly known as The Raid, which
was a classical slaughter," he said.
After
the war, Kepiro fled to Argentina but returned
to Hungary in 1996 and was discovered in Budapest
in 2006 by investigators for the Simon Wiesenthal
Center.
Kepiro
has been described as one of the last living
alleged Holocaust-era criminals
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