At 97, Hungarian Sandor Kepiro, who goes on trial here Thursday as one of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals, is still fit and continues to claim his innocence.

"I have no regret, all I did was my duty," the one-time police officer told Hungarian television ATV in October when questioned about his role in a 1942 deadly raid in the Serbian town of Novi Sad.

Unlike alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, 90, whom he replaced as number one on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi criminals, Kepiro remains fit for his age: he hears and sees well and moves around without help.

Nazi war crime suspects have often used old age and frail health to avoid jail.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who is on trial in Germany charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder while a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland in 1943, was even carried into court on a stretcher before proceedings were temporarily suspended.

A lawyer by profession, Kepiro started his military career at Budapest's Gendarmerie Academy in 1938, aged 24.

He quickly moved up on the ladder until his promotion to captain in 1943 and continued with the corps until 1944.

It is during this time that the Nazi-hunting Wiesenthal Center says Kepiro took part in the mass murder of civilians in Novi Sad -- then occupied by Nazi Germany's Hungarian allies -- between January 21 and 23, 1942.

As the head of a patrol, Kepiro has been charged with the death of 36 people. But while he has admitted his presence at the raid, he maintains his innocence.

Already sentenced to 10 and 14 years in 1944 and 1946 for his role in the massacre, he avoided prison in Hungary by fleeing to Argentina, where he spent half a century.

Married with two children, he worked as a farmer and in the textile industry but little else is known of his life there.

Kepiro eventually returned to Hungary with a Hungarian passport in 1996 and lived in a flat facing one of Budapest's synagogues, before being tracked down by the Wiesenthal Centre in 2006.

His trial could be one of the last of its kind, according to Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

His indictment however "sends a powerful message that the passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers and that old age should not protect those who committed such heinous crimes," Zuroff said in a recent statement.
 

(AFP)