BUDAPEST (AP) — Sandor Kepiro, a former officer in a Hungarian special security force who was recently acquitted of Holocaust-era war crimes charges, died here on Saturday. He was 97.

His death was announced by his lawyer, Zsolt Zetenyi.

In July, Mr. Kepiro was acquitted of charges that he was responsible for the deaths of 36 people during World War II raids by Hungarian forces allied with the Germans in northern Serbia. More than 1,200 civilians were killed in those raids.

Mr. Kepiro had been convicted twice before of taking part in that massacre. He was freed from prison shortly after his first conviction, in 1944, and he was convicted in absentia two years later by the Communist government, after he had fled to Argentina. He returned to Hungary in 1996.

Mr. Kepiro had acknowledged that as a junior police officer he took part in rounding up people before the massacre, but he denied killing anyone or giving the order to shoot victims. His case was brought to the attention of the Hungarian authorities in 2006 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which declared him the world’s most-wanted Nazi war criminal.

nytimes.com