Nazi war crimes trial verdict expected in July

The verdict in the trial against suspected Nazi war criminal Sandor Kepiro, accused of mass killings in Serbia in 1942, will be handed down in late July, the judge said Monday. "The trial will proceed with the last testimonies on June 24, then the defence and the prosecution will hold their closing arguments on June 30 and July 1," judge Bela Varga said. The summations were expected to last two hours each, starting with the prosecutor. The verdict, together with the 3.5-hour judgment, would be pronounced three weeks later and take place over two days to accommodate the frail defendant, Varga added. Kepiro faces a life sentence for his alleged participation in the Novi Sad raid by Hungarian forces on January 21-23, 1942, in which more than 1,200 Jews and Serbs were murdered. Specifically, the 97-year-old is accused of ordering the rounding up and execution of 36 Jews and Serbs as head of one of the patrols involved in the raid. On Monday, the judge continued to read out testimonies from earlier court cases, which are being used as historical background. The judge himself was visibly moved by the testimony of a mother recalling how she had been forced by Hungarian soldiers to witness the massacre of her five children. Varga also compared the Hungarian soldiers -- who told prisoners they were being taken away for identification when in fact they were executed on the banks of the Danube -- to that of German soldiers who made prisoners believe they were headed for the showers instead of the gas chambers. Kepiro, 97, was tracked down in Hungary by chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2006.