MOSCOW, August 12 (RIA Novosti) – A Hungarian man who was arrested last year and charged with involvement in Nazi war crimes during World War II has died aged 98, Hungarian and international media reported Monday.
Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary had topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Most Wanted list until the Jewish human rights organization found him living in Budapest in fall 2011.
He was arrested in June 2012 on charges of sending over 15,000 Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II, and other charges of brutality relating to his time as a senior policeman and ghetto commander in the town of Kosice, now Slovakia, international media reported.
Csatary denied all charges, the Associated Press reported.
In June 2013 Dr. Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Center’s “Nazi-hunting division,” called Csatary’s indictment “an important reminder that justice for the victims of the Holocaust can still be achieved.”
Csatary was being treated in hospital for pneumonia when he died, Hungarian and international media reported Monday, citing his lawyer, adding that the case against him has now been terminated.
In 1948 a court in then-Czechoslovakia sentenced him, in absentia, to death on similar charges.
He fled to Canada, gained Canadian citizenship in 1955, and lived there until 1997 when he vanished after the truth about his Nazi past was revealed, the Associated Press reported.
