Mr Kepiro said he killed no-one and had intervened to save lives
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Nazi war crimes suspect acquitted
The race to bring Nazis to justice
Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian policeman recently acquitted of Nazi-era war
crimes, has died in hospital in Budapest at
the age of 97.
His
death was reported by his family and lawyer,
who said he believed the trial this summer
had contributed to his client's poor health.
A Budapest
court dismissed charges he had ordered the
execution of 30 people because of insufficient
evidence.
Mr Kepiro
once topped an international list of wanted
war crimes suspects.
His
acquittal in July caused outrage at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center with its chairman, Efraim
Zuroff, pledging to do "everything possible to see that it's overturned".
'Refused
to shoot'
More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians
were murdered over three days by Hungarian
forces in a notorious massacre in the Serbian
city of Novi Sad in 1942.
Mr Kepiro
was accused of rounding up 36 people during
the raid. Thirty of them were put on a lorry,
allegedly on the defendant's orders, and taken
away to be shot.
The
prosecution had demanded at least a prison
sentence for Mr Kepiro, but he insisted he
had not killed anyone.
He said
he had been "the only person to refuse the order to use firearms", and that he had intervened to save five people about to be killed by a corporal.
Mr Kepiro
was previously convicted of involvement in
the killings in Hungary in 1944 but his conviction
was quashed by the fascist government.
He returned
to Hungary in 1996 after decades in Argentina,
and was first accused in 2006 by the Nazi
hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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