Hungarian court: Kepiro conviction moot

Hungarian court: Kepiro conviction moot

Efraim Zuroff, director of the center's office in Israel, provided authorities with documents from the 1944 verdict and asked that Kepiro's 10-year prison sentence for that crime be enforced. Zuroff said the documents came from archives in Serbia.

The Wiesenthal Center said more than 1,200 Serbs, Jews and Romas were killed during the January 1942 slayings involving the Hungarian forces.

The Budapest Municipal Court issued a statement saying the 1944 ruling by a Hungarian military court cannot be enforced because a retrial shortly afterward annulled the sentence.

"Since the 10-year prison sentence became void in the course of a retrial, the sentencing provision which the court could have enforced has also become void," the court said.

Zuroff called the Budapest court's decision "morally unjust and legally flawed," and said the 1944 decision to overturn Kepiro's conviction was made possible only by Nazi Germany's invasion of Hungary in March of that year.

"Kepiro was convicted in independent Hungary and he was only pardoned because Hungary was occupied by the Nazis," Zuroff said by telephone from Israel.

Kepiro, who has denied the accusations, said Thursday at a news conference that his 1944 conviction was part of a show trial, an attempt by authorities to find scapegoats after his commanding officers escaped to Germany.

He said his task as a gendarmerie captain in Novi Sad was to supervise the identification of those being rounded up, but he denied knowing about the killings.

"This was a just ruling, because I did not commit any crimes," he said of the court's ruling. "In my designated area there was no use of weapons. I always felt clean and I feel clean now, too."

Kepiro, who moved back to Hungary in 1996 after living for decades in Argentina, also said he had intervened “to save the lives of a Serbian Jewish family that owned a hotel in Novi Sad and was about to the taken away to be shot by Hungarian soldiers.”

While no documents have been found in Hungary of Kepiro's 1944 conviction or the retrial which cleared him, a decision published in the May 31, 1944, edition of the Hungarian military's official gazette showed that Kepiro was among several officers whose rank and position were restored.

Kepiro's lawyer, Zsolt Zetenyi, said that when Kepiro's sentence for disloyalty was annulled, he was declared to have no criminal record. "Only those without a criminal record were allowed to serve in the gendarmerie," Zetenyi said.

Zuroff also claims that Kepiro was sentenced to 14 years in prison for war crimes by a Hungarian civilian court in 1946, but Hungarian officials have been unable to find records of that trial.

Thursday's ruling can be appealed within eight days by the prosecutor's office, Kepiro or his lawyer, the court said.