‘Most-wanted’ Nazi war criminal Laszlo Csatary dies

Laszlo Csatary, a former police officer indicted in June by Hungarian authorities for abusing Jews and contributing to their deportation to Nazi death camps during World War II, has died. He was 98.

His lawyer, Gabor Horvath, said Csatary died Saturday of pneumonia in a Budapest hospital.

Csatary topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most wanted Nazi criminals in 2012. The Center is a Jewish organization active in hunting down Nazis who have yet to be brought to justice

In July, a Hungarian court suspended Csatary’s trial three weeks after it began, citing a previous conviction as the possible basis for double jeopardy. Csatary, a former police commander of the Kassa internment camp in Slovakia was sentenced to death in absentia in Czechoslovakia in 1948 for similar war crimes.

The former police officer “regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip without any special reasons, regardless of their sex, age or health,” prosecutors said, as quoted by AFP.

He had denied the charges.

The Budapest Prosecutor’s Office appealed the suspension of the trial, and said that the 1948 ruling was not relevant to to charges being prosecuted in 2013.

After the war, he lived for decades in Canada before leaving in 1997 after it was discovered that he had lied about his past to obtain citizenship. He lived in Hungary for 15 years thereafter until prosecuters began investigating his case on the basis on information from the Wiesenthal Center.

In 2012, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun helped bring attention to his case after tracking down the old man, photographing him and confronting him at his front door.