Outrage as war crimes accused is cleared

Campaigners who considered the case “one of the last major trials” of alleged Holocaust-era war criminal suspects were shocked by the verdict.

“It’s an absolutely outrageous decision,” Efraim Zuroff, the chief ‘Nazi hunter’ with the Wiesenthal Centre’s Jerusalem office said.

Sandor Kepiro was charged with involvement in the killing of the 35 – mostly Jews and Serbs – during an anti-partisan raid in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, then under Hungarian control, on January 23, 1942. He returned to Hungary in 1996 after decades in Argentina.

Mr Zuroff, who brought Kepiro’s case to light in 2006, said: “It flies in the face of all the evidence, everything we know about this dark event and the mass murder that took place in Novi Sad.”

In Serbia, deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric said he expected Hungarian prosecutors to appeal against the verdict. Lawyers have until late on Friday to lodge an appeal. “Of course, we are not pleased,” Mr Vekaric said.

Hungary was a member of the Axis powers – allied with Germany, Italy and Japan – from 1940, participating in the 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia was then part.

Prosecutors had stated in the trial, which began on May 5, that unidentified members of a patrol under Kepiro’s command killed four people during the raid.

Kepiro, at the time a gendarmerie captain, was also suspected of being involved in the deaths of around 30 others who were executed on the banks of the River Danube.

Many of the dozens of people attending the court session cheered and clapped after Judge Bela Varga read out the verdict of the three-judge tribunal

Kepiro rejected all the charges in a statement read out at the start of the court session.

“I am innocent. I never killed, never stole. I served my country,” said the statement read out by Kepiro’s psychologist.

He added that Kepiro said he returned to Hungary from Argentina in 1996 “because for him without Hungary there is no life”.