Jobbik official files police complaint against Zuroff
The vice president of Hungary's ultranationalist Jobbik
Party filed a complaint with police against Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff for
making "false statements."
Novak Elod said he filed the complaint in connection with
allegations that Zuroff made against war criminal Lazslo Csatary that were
dismissed recently by Budapest prosecutors.
Knowingly making false accusations can lead to a
five-year prison sentence in Hungary.
Jobbik filed the complaint to help prevent the
"recurrence of such accusations" by "Efraim Zuroff of the
Holocaust industry," according to a statement by Elod.
Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel
office, presented Hungarian authorities with reseach implicating Csatary, a
Hungarian former police officer, in the deportations of Jews from Kosice in
present-day Slovakia in 1941 and in 1944.
Csatary, who has resided in Hungary for the past 15
years, was arrested last month.
The prosecution team in Csatary's case last week
announced it had dropped the allegations pertaining to Csatary's actions in
1941 because they had been "unsubstantiated." The main witness in the
case, Marika Weinberger, told JTA that the Hungarian prosecution had never
interviewed her.
Earlier this week, Hungarian attorney Futo Barnabas urged
authorities to prosecute Zuroff for deliberately making false accusations.
A Czechoslovakian court sentenced Csatary to death in
absentia for war crimes in 1948, but he escaped to Canada before returning to
his native Hungary. He was arrested last month in Budapest.
Peter Feldmajer, the president of Hungary's Federation of
Jewish Communities, said that indicting Zuroff for accusing Csatary “would be
an act of insanity.”
Last year, a Hungarian court summoned Zuroff to answer
libel accusations leveled at him by Sandor Kepiro, a suspected war criminal
whom Zuroff had exposed. Zuroff was found not guilty.
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