World's most wanted Nazi arrested [-The law will always catch the criminals, wherever they are!!!!]

Laszlo Csatary leaves the courthouse in Budapest (AFP: Attila Kisbenedek)

July 19, 2012
Reuters

The world's most wanted Nazi war criminal has been put under house arrest by authorities in Hungary.

Laszlo Csatary, the 97-year-old who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's dwindling list of wanted Nazi suspects, said nothing as he was whisked away in a car following his early-morning arrest in Budapest.

Csatary was then questioned for several hours by an investigating magistrate at a military prosecution office.

The Wiesenthal Centre accuses him of organising the World War II deportation of some 16,000 Jews from the ghetto of Kosice, in present-day Slovakia, to their deaths at the Auschwitz extermination camp.

State prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said Csatary was surprised by his arrest.

"Our viewpoint is that at this age, being under house arrest is already quite a shock," he said.

"We have to make sure that this man remains alive and is able to stand trial.

"The suspect is in good physical and mental health. He is being cooperative.

"One of his arguments in his defence is that he was obeying orders."

In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court condemned Csatary to death in absentia, but he made it to Canada where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship there in the 1990s.

He ended up in Budapest where he has lived freely ever since until the Wiesenthal Centre alerted Hungarian authorities last year.

Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi-hunter, welcomed the arrest and urged Hungarian authorities to complete the rest of the judicial process and bring Csatary to justice as quickly as possible.

"This is the debt owed to his many victims who were tortured and sent to be murdered at Auschwitz," he said.

"The passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers and old age should not afford protection to the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes."