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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