Hungarian authorities have detained a 97-year-old Nazi war crimes suspect accused of sending nearly 16,000 Jews to their deaths during World War II.
Laszlo Csatary, the top target on the Simon Wiesenthal Center most wanted Nazis list, was taken into custody in Budapest, where he had been hiding out for more than a decade, authorities said Wednesday.
Initial reports said Csatary was charged with war crimes, though authorities said he was just being questioned and hadn't been charged with anything yet.
Csatary was a senior police officer in Kosice, Slovakia, which at that time was occupied by Nazi Hungary and was known as Kassa, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
He was in charge of the Jewish ghetto there and is suspected of sending some 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz and other death camps between 1941 and 1944.
In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to death. But he escaped to Canada, where he lived under an assumed identity and worked as an art dealer in Toronto and Montreal.
His cover was blown in 1997, and he fled Canada as officials there were working to deport him.
He was living a quiet life in Hungary until last year, when the Wiesenthal center's top Nazi hunter tracked him down.
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TXT 24
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