BUDAPEST — Hungary's Sandor Kepiro, until recently the world's most wanted Nazi
war crimes suspect, died Saturday in Budapest aged 97, according
to his family.
The announcement, reported by the Hungarian news agency MTI, came six weeks after
a Budapest court cleared Kepiro of the war
crimes charges against him.
"Sandor
Kepiro... died Saturday morning, the family
and lawyer of the deceased announced," MTI reported, without giving any details of the exact time or cause of death.
The
former Hungarian gendarmerie captain had been
suspected of ordering the execution of over
30 Jews and Serbs in the Serbian town of Novi
Sad in January 1942.
Until
his acquittal, Kepiro had topped the Simon
Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi
war criminals.
In Belgrade,
Serb war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic
voiced regret that Kepiro had died, claiming
justice had not yet bene done for the victims
of the Novi Sad killings.
"We
regret that the truth has not been established
before justice regarding this crime and that
justice has not been served for the victims," Vukcevic was quoted as saying by the Serbian Tanjug news agency,
The
court in Budapest had freed Kepiro on July
18, following a two-month trial that relied
heavily on evidence contained in old documents
and testimonies.
In his
closing remarks after that verdict, Judge
Bela Varga noted that the trial "has primarily raised concerns and doubts, but no facts.
"Because
there were so many doubts and concerns, the
court acquitted (Kepiro) not on the basis
of the lack of a criminal act, but based on
the lack of proof," he said.
Kepiro
had faced a possible life sentence for his
alleged participation in a raid by Hungarian
forces -- then allied to Nazi Germany -- in
Novi Sad on January 21-23, 1942, in which
more than 1,200 Jews and Serbs were murdered.
Visibly
weakened at his trial, Kepiro, who always
insisted on his innocence, had been in hospital
since July.
Although
he was deemed fit enough to stand trial, the
proceedings dragged on to take into account
the defendant's diminishing health and poor
hearing, and he appeared in court for the
verdict in a wheelchair and with a drip attached
to his arm.
"I
am innocent, I never killed, I never robbed," he had insisted before the verdict.
His
acquittal sparked immediate criticism from
the Simon Wiesenthal Center and from Serbia,
where hundreds gathered in Belgrade and Novi
Sad to protest the court's decision, shouting "He is guilty."
The
Wiesenthal Center called it a "scandal" and an "outrageous miscarriage of justice."
"(The)
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 after the court read out its decision.
Kepiro
had already been found guilty of the crimes
in Novi Sad twice in the 1940s but avoided
prison by fleeing to Argentina in 1944, where
he remained for half a century before returning
to Budapest in 1996, where he was tracked
down by Nazi hunter Zuroff.
With
proceedings against another Nazi war criminal,
Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, closed in Germany
in May, Kepiro trial's had been seen as one
of the last of its kind.
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