97-Year-Old Hungarian Man Is Acquitted in World War II Massacre

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Source: The New York Times

BERLIN — A court in Hungary on Monday acquitted a 97-year-old man accused of taking part in a massacre during World War II, Hungarian news reports said.

The court found the man, Sandor Kepiro, not guilty of war crimes in connection with the deaths of 36 people in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad in 1942. Mr. Kepiro had been convicted twice before of taking part in the massacre, known as the Racija, the Serbian word for raid.

Mr. Kepiro had previously acknowledged to reporters that he took part as a junior police officer in rounding up people before the massacre, but denied killing anyone or giving the order to shoot victims. More than 1,200 civilians, mostly Jews but also Serbs and Roma, were killed, their bodies dumped in Danube River.

“The verdict flies in the face of all the evidence, all logic, and the understanding of events as they occurred,” said Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, speaking by telephone from Budapest, where he had gone to the courtroom for the reading of the verdict by a three-judge panel.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/world/europe/19hungary.html