(JTA) -- Suspected war criminal Laszlo Csatary of Hungary will not be charged
with the murder of 300 Jews in 1941, prosecutors in Budapest
said.
Csatary’s alleged complicity in the murder of some 15,000 Jews in 1944 is still
being investigated.
Accusations that Csatary, 97, helped
send the 300 to their deaths at the Kamyanets-Podilsky camp
in Ukraine were "groundless," Bettina Bagoly of the Budapest municipal prosecutor's office said Wednesday.
In an interview for Hungary’s Kossuth
radio, she added that Csatary was not present at the site
of the deportation and lacked the authority to be responsible
for it.
The prosecution is following up on
allegations that in 1944, Csatary, a senior police officer,
was responsible for deporting 15,700 people to Nazi death
camps from the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, Slovakia.
Hungarian police arrested Csatary
last month based on the findings of an independent investigation
by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Efraim Zuroff, the director of the
Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, told JTA that he would
check if the Hungarian prosecution had interviewed any witnesses
before dropping the charges. Zuroff said an 84-year-old Holocaust
survivor had accused Csatary of arranging for four of her
brothers to be pulled out of a labor camp and murdered at
Kamyanets-Podilsky, along with other family members.
Hungarian police placed arrested Csatary
15 years after his return to Hungary from Canada. He had
worked as an art dealer before Canada stripped him of his
citizenship.
Britain’s The Sun reported on Zuroff’s
investigation last month. Budapest’s chief prosecutor said
on July 17 that it “contains no new evidence.” Csatary was
nonetheless arrested the next day. stljewishlight.com
|