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is accused in Hungary of torturing and murdering Peter Balazs, a 18-year-old Jewish man, in 1944 in Budapest while serving as a soldier in the army of his native Hungary, then allied with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
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JERUSALEM/SIDNEY (EJP)---The Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed deep satisfaction following the rejection by the Australian Supreme Court of a legal challenge mounted by a suspected Hungarian Nazi war criminal Charles Zentai to prevent his extradition to stand trial in Budapest for WWII crimes.
Zentai, 84, is accused in Hungary of torturing and murdering Peter Balazs, a 18-year-old Jewish man, in 1944 in Budapest while serving as a soldier in the army of his native Hungary, then allied with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. He has denied the allegations.
Together with a suspect wanted for fraud in Ireland, he had claimed that the courts in Perth did not have the jurisdiction to rule in his extradition case, a technical argument which hereto had delayed his extradition to Hungary for more than two years.
In a statement issued in Jerusalem, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, called upon the Australian authorities to expedite the extradition process to help ensure that justice is achieved, and warned that Zentai’s supporters would make every effort to present him as unable to stand trial even if this was not necessarily the case.
"The families of the victims are the ones who deserve our sympathy, not those who committed murder," he added.
"It was Adam Balasz, the brother of Zentai’s alleged victim, who submitted the evidence to the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem shortly after “Operation: Last Chance” was launched in Hungary, with a request that we try to track down and bring his brother’s murderer to justice."
