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Alleged Nazi war criminal Csatary arrested

Kathrin Lauer and Helen Maguire –

Budapest (dpa) – Hungarian authorities have arrested alleged Nazi war criminal Laszlo Csatary in Budapest, Hungarian news agency MTI reported Wednesday.

Csatary, 97, a Hungarian national, had performed gruesome acts of torture on Jewish inmates in a camp in 1944, when he was police chief of the Hungarian-occupied town of Kosice, prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said according to MTI.

If found guilty, Csatary could face life in prison.

Csatary had rejected the accusations during a first interrogation but also insisted that, as a high-ranking police officer, he had only “carried out commands” and “done his duty,” Ibolya said.

The arrest came after Israel’s Simon Wiesenthal Centre submitted new evidence to the prosecutor in Budapest last week, relating to Csatary’s alleged role in the deportation of Jews from the Slovakian town of Kosice, occupied by Hungary during World War II.

The prosecutor said Csatary had commanded that waggons deporting Jews to concentration camps should not be fitted with aeration. This had affected almost 12,000 prisoners transported over the course of two months to camps including Auschwitz, Ibolya said.

Csatary had also regularly whipped prisoners, irrespective of age, gender or state of health, the prosecutor charged.

The alleged war criminal was now likely to be held under house arrest, the prosecutor said, as his advanced age meant there was no risk of escape.

Ahead of his arrest, reporters with British tabloid The Sun photographed a man believed to be Csatary in the Hungarian capital, after receiving information from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in an attempt to move the case forward.

On Tuesday, the centre had urged Hungarian President Janos Ader to take action, during a visit by the president to Israel.

In April, Csatary topped the Wiesenthal Centre’s annual “most wanted” list. The centre works to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.

In the spring of 1944, Csatary allegedly played a key role in the deportation of 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp.

After the war, a Czech court sentenced him to death in absentia. He had fled to Canada, but was stripped of his Canadian citizenship in 1997 and voluntarily left that country.

In Germany meanwhile, it emerged Wednesday that prosecutors had reopened an inquiry into a former member of the Nazi SS alleged to have murdered a Dutch resistance fighter in 1944.

The man, identified as Siert B and thought to be in his 90s, had allegedly killed a Dutch prisoner in Delfzijl in the Netherlands. He received a 7-year prison sentence in 1980 for being an accessory of two other wartime murders.

His case was reopened in March, a public prosecutor told dpa Wednesday, after its classification changed from alleged manslaughter to murder, meaning the statute of limitation no longer applied.

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