The Budapest Investigating Prosecution Office said on Monday that allegations by Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff according to which Hungarian war crime suspect Laszlo Csatary was linked to the Kamyanets-Podilsky deportations of 1941 were groundless.

Public radio Kossuth reported that according to an expert investigating the case Csatary was not in Kassa (now Kosice, Slovakia) in 1941 and therefore he did not have the opportunity to be involved in the deportations to western Ukraine’s Kamyanets-Podilsky. However, the investigation will continue in connection with his involvement in the 1944 deportations.

Zuroff, the director of Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, had submitted reports against Csatary for the deportations in 1941 and 1944.

Last week, the Budapest Investigating Prosecution Office interviewed 97-year-old Csatary as a suspect in war crimes in connection with the events in Kassa in 1944. He denied allegations.

Spokeswoman of the Budapest Public Prosecutor Bettina Bagoly told the radio that information gathered so far had revealed that Csatary could not be associated with the deportations in 1941.

According to Jerusalem’s Wiesenthal Centre, Csatary, as police commander of the local ghetto in Kassa, had a key role in the deportation of over 15,000 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp in spring 1944, and around 300 Jews to a camp in Kamyanets-Podilsky.

At the end of the war, Csatary fled Hungary and settled in Canada, where he was granted Canadian citizenship in 1955. He was sentenced to death in absentia by the Czechoslovak authorities in 1948. In October 1997, Csatary left Canada to avoid procedures of expulsion after it turned out that his application for citizenship had contained false data.

Hungarian authorities put Csatary under house arrest in mid-July.

politics.hu