Hungary to probe man suspected of Nazi war crimes

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Hungarian prosecutors are investigating a man suspected of war crimes committed during World War II, officials said Wednesday. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish advocacy group, last year identified Sandor Kepiro, 93, as having been convicted in the 1940s but never punished for his role in the killing of more than 1,200 people by Hungarian forces in Novi Sad, Serbia, during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II. Efraim Zuroff, director of the center's Israel office, provided authorities with documents from the 1944 verdict and asked that Kepiro's 10-year prison sentence for that crime be enforced. Last month, however, the Budapest Municipal Court said the 1944 ruling could not be enforced because a retrial shortly afterward annulled the sentence. Kepiro, then a gendarmerie captain, has denied the accusations, saying he was a scapegoat in a show trial.