A 97-year-old Hungarian, until recently the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect, went free from court Monday after being cleared of ordering the execution of over 30 Jews and Serbs in 1942.

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The prosecution had demanded at least a prison sentence for Sandor Kepiro, who until his arrest topped the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted Nazi criminals.

But the defence insisted there was no tangible evidence that Kepiro had carried out war crimes.

The Wiesenthal Centre denounced the court's decision as a "scandal".

"Today's verdict is laughing in the face of at least 1,246 victims of the raid in Novi Sad," said the centre's director, Efraim Zuroff, who left the courtroom right after the verdict.

A one-time Hungarian gendarmerie captain, Kepiro faced a life sentence for his alleged participation in a raid by Hungarian forces -- then allied to Nazi Germany -- in the now Serbian town of Novi Sad on January 21-23, 1942, in which more than 1,200 Jews and Serbs were murdered.

Kepiro was accused of ordering the round-up and execution of some 36 Jews and Serbs as head of one of the patrols in the raid.

The battle is on!
Zuroff hinted the legal battle was not yet over.

"We have been informed by the prosecutor that there would be an appeal against this ruling," he said.

There was no official word from the prosecutor, however.

Serbia expressed disappointment with the outcome, saying "we are not satisfied and we expect the Hungarian prosecutors to file an appeal," Serbian deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric told the Tanjug news agency.

The prosecution's case rested heavily on old testimonies and verdicts from previous trials in the 1940s.

"There are cases where there is no access to direct evidence as the direct witnesses are no longer alive," prosecutor Zsolt Falvai acknowledged Monday.

Indirect evidence
"We are obliged to base our case on written proof, documents, even if these are old testimonies."

During the trial, however, several experts cast doubts on the authenticity of these documents, many of which were incomplete or contained translation mistakes.

The defence also noted that testimonies made in front of communist courts could have been coerced.

In his reasoning after the verdict, Judge Bela Varga dismissed the court documents from 1944 as "absurd and nonsense", as Kepiro had then been judged on collective charges.

The reasoning was read out in court for two hours and the reading was to continue on Tuesday, albeit without Kepiro whose presence was no longer needed as he has been found not guilty, Varga said.

Kepiro, who appeared in court on Monday but looked unwell, insisted in a last statement before the verdict was read out: "I am innocent, I never killed, I never robbed."

Noticeably tired, he was allowed to leave the court after the verdict, and was returned to hospital, where he has spent the last week due to health problems.

Although extremely frail, Kepiro was repeatedly deemed mentally fit to stand trial and attended all the proceedings, equipped with headphones due to his poor hearing.

Elviara Fisova, 92, who lost her brother and sister-in-law during the Novi Sad massacre and 20 other relatives in other crimes committed against Jews in the region, said a guilty verdict would not have accomplished much.

Kepiro "lived his entire life unpunished, a condemnation today would not compensate much," she said, tearing up shortly after the verdict was announced in Budapest.

The trial, which started on May 5, moved along slowly as the judge limited daily proceedings to two 45-minute sessions to accommodate Kepiro.

Kepiro was found guilty of the crimes in Novi Sad twice: first in 1944, when he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a sentence that was quashed a few months later; and then again when he was sentenced in absentia to 14 years' imprisonment in 1946, this time under communist rule.

He avoided prison by fleeing to Argentina in 1944, where he remained for half a century before returning to Budapest in 1996. Nazi hunter Zuroff tracked him down there 10 years later.

With proceedings against another Nazi war criminal, Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, closed in Germany in May, Zuroff has predicted that the Kepiro trial could be one of the last of its kind.

Source: AFA