Slovakia sets September sentencing date for Nazi war criminal

A Slovak court announced on Thursday that the sentencing hearing for the world's most wanted Nazi collaborator who has been convicted of war crimes will go ahead on September 26. Hungarian Laszlo Csatary, 98, was found guilty in absentia shortly after World War II in what is now Slovakia for sending thousands of Jews to their deaths. But it was not until last year that the former police officer was located and arrested in Hungary. "The public hearing will take place on September 26 in Kosice, eastern Slovakia, provided the court receives proof Csatary has been served the subpoena," court spokeswoman Marcela Galova told AFP. The case has been in legal limbo for the past few months. The Kosice court was forced to postpone an earlier hearing because Csatary is under house arrest in Hungary for the same charges and is legally barred from leaving that country. Meanwhile, the Hungarian court last month suspended its proceedings against the silver-haired Csatary on grounds of double jeopardy. The legal wrangle has sparked concern among Holocaust survivors and Kosice's Jews that Csatary may escape justice. A communist-era Slovak court in Kosice had sentenced him to death in 1948 for war crimes. With capital punishment now abolished in Slovakia, the court commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment in April. The September hearing is to decide at which prison he will serve out his sentence. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which lists Csatary as its most wanted living Nazi, said he had a hand in deporting nearly 16,000 Jews to death camps during the war. It said he helped run a ghetto for Jews from Kosice -- then part of Hungary and known as Kassa -- and nearby areas following the German Nazi occupation in 1944. Hungarian prosecutors claimed he "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." Galova said "the court had asked Hungary to ensure the delivery" of the subpoena. Once it is served, the court can rule in his absence and issue a European arrest warrant that would allow Slovakia to seek his extradition, according to Mikulas Buzgo, Csatary's Slovak public defender. Csatary fled to Canada after the war, where he worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship in 1997 for lying about his wartime actions. He fled to Budapest and lived undisturbed until July 2012, when he was tracked down in the Hungarian capital via information from the Wiesenthal Centre. At a hearing behind closed doors in Budapest, he denied all accusations. He has been under house arrest ever since.