BRATISLAVA (AFP)---Slovak justice authorities said Thursday more charges have
been filed against the alleged Nazi-era war criminal Laszlo
Csatary, detained in neighbouring Hungary.
The 97-year-old Csatary, who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's dwindling wanted
list of surviving suspected Nazi war criminals, allegedly
organised the World War II deportation to their deaths of
some 16,000 Jews from the ghetto of Kosice in present-day
southeast Slovakia, which was then part of Hungary.
"A Kosice citizen, whose
father was deported to Germany in January 1945, on Wednesday
filed charges against Csatary for crimes against humanity," Milan Filicko, spokesman for the general prosecutor's office in Kosice told
AFP.
"The charges include Csatary's
responsibility for deportations of Kosice citizens to Germany," Filicko said.
Between November 1944 and January
1945, 500-700 people were murdered in Kosice, including 12
who were hanged in the town centre, the SME daily reported
Thursday.
"Csatary, who was then
a senior police officer, should be also held
responsible for these crimes," a
second citizen who filed charges against Csatary, but wished
to remain anonymous, told the daily.
Slovak justice authorities have 30
days to decide whether to formally indict Cstarty on the
complaints.
As a member of the "committee
for cleaning the city of undesirable
citizens", Csatary
helped to draw up a list of some 1,200 Kosice locals who
did not support the Nazi regime, SME reported.
Slovakia's Justice Minister Tomas
Borec said Monday he wanted Csatary to be tried in his country,
echoing a similar call by Slovakia's Jewish community last
week.
According to the justice ministry,
a Slovak court would most likely give Csatary life sentence.
In 1948, a court in then-Czechoslovakia
sentenced him to death in absentia but the death penalty
has since been banned in Slovakia.
Csatary, whose full name is Laszlo
Csizsik-Csatary, helped run the Jewish ghetto in Kosice,
a town that was visited in April 1944 by Adolf Eichmann,
a key figure in the Nazis' Final Solution, the Wiesenthal
Center says.
While there between 1941 and 1944,
Csatary beat and brutalized Jews and sent 16,000 to their
deaths in Ukraine and to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz
death camp, it said.
Currently under house arrest in Budapest,
Csatary was arrested on July 18 in the Hungarian capital
on information from the Wiesenthal Center.
He had fled to Canada after the war
but apparently lived undisturbed in Hungary for about 15
years before he was arrested.
ejpress.org
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