Hungarian authorities detained, grilled and put under house arrest on Wednesday a 97-year-old who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's dwindling wanted list of surviving suspected Nazi war criminals. Laszlo Csatary, accused by the Wiesenthal Center of organising the deportation to their deaths of some 16,000 Jews from the ghetto of Kosice in present-day Slovakia in World War II, protested his innocence.
"Our viewpoint is that at this age, being under house arrest is already quite a shock," state prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said. "We have to make sure that this man remains alive and is able to stand trial."
"One of his arguments in his defence is that he was obeying orders." Clutching a plastic bag, dressed in a grey jacket and surprisingly sprightly for his age, the former senior police officer said nothing as he was whisked away in a car by two friends or relatives.
This followed his early morning arrest in the Hungarian capital Budapest and several hours of questioning by an investigating magistrate at a military prosecution office.
"The suspect is in good physical and mental health. He is being co-operative. He was surprised (about being arrested) but he expected to be questioned," Ibolya said.
Csatary, full name Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, helped run the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, a town now in Slovakia personally visited in April 1944 by Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Nazi's Final Solution, the Wiesenthal Center says.
While there between 1941 and 1944 Csatary beat, brutalised and sent 16,000 Jews to their deaths in Ukraine and to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz extermination camp, it says.
In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court condemned Csatary to death in absentia but he made it to Canada where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship there in the 1990s.