London, Jul 19 (IANS): The world's most wanted Nazi who sent thousands of Jews to torture camps during World War II has been finally arrested in Hungary's capital Budapest about seven decades after he committed the crime. He is 97.
According to The Sun, the hunt for the Nazi war criminal led police at dawn Wednesday to the flat of Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, who deported 15,700 Jews to Nazi death camps. The man was quizzed before being placed under house arrest facing war crime and torture charges.
On Sunday, the daily had reported how Csatary was living alone in a flat in the Hungarian capital Budapest, among families unaware of his vile past.
Top Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said: "When you look at a person like this, you shouldn't see an old, frail person but think of a man who, at the height of his physical powers, devoted all his energy to persecuting and murdering innocent men, women and children.
"This is the debt owed to his many victims who were tortured and sent to be murdered at Auschwitz. 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."
Csatary was the chief of an internment camp, in the Slovakian town of Kassa, now Kosice, from where Jews were deported to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.
He as a "commander" in the Royal Hungarian Police, was present in 1944 when the trains were loaded and sent on their way, say prosecutors. He declined a request by one of the 80 Jews crammed into a wagon to cut holes in the walls to let air in.
Csatary "regularly" used a dog whip against the Jewish detainees "without any special reasons and irrespective of the assaulted people's sex, age or health condition".
He fled Europe after the war and was sentenced to death in his absence for the atrocities he carried out.
Csatary resurfaced in Canada where he was living as an art dealer, fleeing 15 years ago before he could be deported after officials twigged his true identity.