HUNGARY HAS charged a former police captain with war crimes for his alleged role in a 1942 massacre of more than 1,000 Jews, Serbs and Roma in northern Serbia.
Sandor Kepiro (96) was named at the top of a list of wanted war criminals by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre – an organisation founded by Holocaust survivors to hunt down Nazi fugitives – which has strongly criticised Budapest for its past failure to prosecute him. Hungarian prosecutors say they recently found documents relating to Kepiro’s case in Serbia’s archives and have charged him with complicity in the murder of four people.
The unit that he led was also allegedly responsible for the deportation of 30 other people who were later executed, and the killing of two brothers who tried to escape.
At least 1,250 civilians were massacred in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad, which was occupied during the war by Hungarian forces allied to Nazi Germany.Many victims were shot beside the Danube and pushed into the river.
A Hungarian court convicted Kepiro of involvement in the atrocity in 1944. But he was quickly released and allowed to leave for Argentina, where he lived for almost 50 years.
He is believed to have returned to Budapest in 1996, a decade before the Wiesenthal centre tracked him down and demanded his arrest.
The accused insists he was wrongly convicted and had no knowledge of plans for the slaughter, although he admits to having been ordered to check the identity of people rounded up in Novi Sad. “I am innocent and need to be acquitted,” Kepiro said yesterday. “I am bedridden and can’t leave my home. I have nothing.”
He has also claimed to have been nowhere near the site of the executions when they took place, and to have objected to orders given by his superiors.
“I expect the independent Hungarian courts to exonerate Sandor Kepiro,” said his lawyer Zsolt Zetenyi. “The documents are incapable of demonstrating his criminal responsibility and I am convinced that he did not commit any war crimes.”
The Wiesenthal centre’s chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff welcomed Hungary’s move: “It has been an uphill battle to convince Hungarian authorities to bring him to justice,” he said. “But this is a powerful message that you can still be held accountable even for crimes committed decades ago.”