The far-right Hungarian Jobbik party has accused Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff of making “false accusations” against alleged war criminal Laszlo Csatary, the party told the MTI news agency on Wednesday.
Zuroff, the director of Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, had submitted reports against Csatary charging that as commander of the ghetto in Kassa, he was responsible for organizing the deportation of approximately 16,000 Jews to their deaths in Ukraine and to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1941 and 1944.
Prosecutors dismissed the 1941 charges last week as “unsubstantiated,” but are still investigating those pertaining to 1944.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has named Csatary as number one on their list of most wanted Nazi war criminals.
Attorney Futo Barnabas told the conservative newspaper Magyar Nemzet that “there are valid grounds to charge Zuroff with deliberately making a false accusation.”
Csatary escaped to Budapest after the war where he has lived undisturbed until the Wiesenthal Center alerted Hungarian authorities last year, providing evidence implicating Csatary in Nazi war crimes.
The Anti-Defamation League has described the far-right Hungarian Jobbik party, responsible for the charges against Zuroff, as “openly anti-Semitic.”