Hungary Nazi war crimes suspect Sandor Kepiro acquitted

A Hungarian man, Sandor Kepiro, has been found not guilty of committing war crimes during a 1942 raid.

A Budapest court acquitted the former police captain, now 97, of ordering the rounding up and execution of over 30 Jews and Serbs in Serbia in 1942.

The prosecution had demanded at least a prison sentence for Mr Kepiro, but he insisted he had not killed.

He previously topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazis.

Many of the dozens of people attending the court session cheered and clapped after Judge Bela Varga read out the verdict of the three-judge tribunal, the AP news agency reported.

The reasoning behind the court's verdict is to be read out over two days, Monday and Tuesday, in light of the frailty of the defendant.

More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered over three days by 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 evidence against him had also been called into question.