Hungarian prosecutors formally announced Tuesday they would appeal against the "not guilty" verdict against a 97-year-old Hungarian accused of Nazi war crimes in 1942.
The decision to clear Sandor Kepiro -- until recently the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect -- of ordering the execution of over 30 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad in January 1942 -- "has no basis.
There are inconsistencies in the reasoning, so I'm going to file an appeal," said prosecutor Zsolt Falvai.
Falvai was speaking after judge Bela Varga had finished reading out the reasoning behind the verdict, which the court had handed down the day before.
Already on Monday, the judge had cited a lack of tangible, credible evidence against Kepiro, noting that much of the prosecution's case rested heavily on old testimonies and verdicts from previous trials in the 1940s.
In his final closing remarks on Tuesday, Varga said: "This trial has primarily raised concerns and doubts, but no facts.
"Because there were so many doubts and concerns, the court acquitted (Kepiro) not on the basis of the lack of a criminal act, but based on the lack of proof."
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which had listed Kepiro as the most wanted Nazi war criminal and helped bring him to court, described the not-guilty verdict as an "outrageous miscarriage of justice".
Efraim Zuroff, head of Centre's Israel office, who has been searching for Nazi war criminals under the center's Operation Last Chance program, said: “This is an absolutely outrageous verdict.” "It flies in the face of all the evidence available. This verdict contradicts what we know about the events in Novi Sad on Jan. 23, 1942. It is an insult to the victims, an insult to the Jewish community, to the Serbian community, and it's a very sad day for Hungary.”
The prosecution had demanded at least a prison sentence.
Jews in Serbia on Monday urged an appeal. “It is not unexpected from a Hungarian society which is not yet mature enough to face its past," said Ana Frenkel of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and a leader of the Novi Sad Jewish community.
Frenkel told AFP that the Wiesenthal centre would continue their fight to have Sandor Kepiro convicted and would push for an appeal to the ruling.
"We are not satisfied and we expect the Hunagrian prosecutor's to file an
appeal," Serbia's deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric told the Tanjug news agency.
Kepiro was not in court Tuesday. Immediately after the verdict was read out on Monday, he had returned to hospital, where he has spent the last week due to health problems.
Kepiro, who always insisted on his innocence, was found guilty of the crimes in Novi Sad twice: first in 1944, when he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a sentence that was quashed a few months later; and then again when he was sentenced in absentia to 14 years' imprisonment in 1946, this time under communist rule.
He avoided prison by fleeing to Argentina in 1944, where he remained for half a century before returning to Budapest in 1996. Nazi hunter Zuroff tracked him down there 10 years later.