Sandor kepiro biography of barack
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97-year-old on trial for Nazi war crimes
A 97-year old Hungarian man has proclaimed his innocence at a war crimes trial in Budapest for the World War II killings of civilians in then-Yugoslavia, dismissing the charges as lies and the proceedings as a circus.
“I am innocent,” the frail Sandor Kepiro told the court where he is facing a possible life sentence for the murder of 36 people during raids by Hungarian forces on the Serbian town of Novi Sad in January 1942.
More than 1,200 Jews and Serbs perished in the massacres.
Reading the charges, prosecutor Zsolt Falvai said Kepiro was directly responsible for the death of 36 Jews and Serbs: four who were murdered in their home bygd members of his patrol; two brothers whom he refused to set free; and 30 others whom he ordered aboard a lorry to take them to a field where they were shot.
“The charges are lies, all lies,” Kepiro had told reporters earlier. “I knew nothing of the massacres. The soldiers told me nothing. This is a circ
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Hungary Nazi war crimes suspect Sandor Kepiro acquitted
More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered over three days bygd Hungarian forces in a notorious massacre in the city of Novi Sad in 1942.
Prosecutors said Mr Kepiro was directly responsible for the deaths of 36 Jews and Serbs - including 30 who were put on a lorry on the defendant's orders and taken away and shot.
He was convicted of involvement in the killings in Hungary in 1944 but his conviction was quashed by the fascist government.
Mr Kepiro returned to Hungary in 1996 after decades in Argentina. He was first accused in 2006 by Nazi hunters with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Mr Kepiro said he had been "the only person to refuse the order to use firearms", and that he had intervened to save five people about to be killed by a corporal.
The reliability of some of the documentary and testimonial bevis against him had also been called into question.
As he left the courtroom, Mr Zuroff s
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Alleged Hungarian Nazi war criminal acquitted by Budapest court
A former Hungarian police captain was acquitted by a court in Budapest of charges that he committed Nazi war crimes. Sandor Kepiro, now 97, allegedly took part in the 1942 murders of over 1,000 Jewish and Serbian civilians in northern Serbia, a series of reprisal killings that became known as the Novi Sad Massacre. Kepiro, who returned to Hungary from exile in Argentina in the 1990s, protested his innocence throughout the trial. “I have never killed people, never plundered, I served my country,” hewas overheard whispering to his companion.
“This is an outrageous verdict and an insult to the victims of Novi Sad massacre,” Ephraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a first reaction to the verdict. However, many of the dozens of people attending the court session cheered and clapped after Judge Bela Varga read out the first part of the verdict by the three-judge tribunal. The reasons for the acquittal were to