By IANS/AKI,
Budapest : A 97-year-old Hungarian man is on trial in a Budapest court for crimes he allegedly committed during World War II.
According to the charges, Sandor Kepiro took part in mass killings of some 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians in Serbia’s northern city of Novi Sad in January 1942.
Prosecutors said he would be charged with having ordered the rounding up and execution of 36 people.
Kepiro was convicted in 1944 for killings in Hungary but his conviction was quashed by the then government and he later fled to Argentina.
He returned to Hungary in 1996 and was tracked down as the world’s most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect.
Serbia had asked his extradition, but the request was turned down by Hungarian authorities.
One of the survivors of the massacre, Lea Ljubibratic, said people were taken from their houses, shot in the streets and then thrown under the ice of the frozen Danube river.
Kepiro has admitted to being a part of pro-Nazi Hungarian forces which occupied the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina during World War II. But he told Hungarian television: “I haven’t regretted anything, all I did was my duty.”