Slovak justice authorities said Thursday more charges have been filed against the alleged Nazi-era war criminal Laszlo Csatary, detained in neighbouring Hungary.
The 97-year-old Csatary, who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's dwindling wanted list of surviving suspected Nazi war criminals, allegedly organised the World War II deportation to their deaths of some 16,000 Jews from the ghetto of Kosice in present-day southeast Slovakia, which was then part of Hungary.
"A Kosice citizen, whose father was deported to Germany in January 1945, on Wednesday filed charges against Csatary for crimes against humanity," Milan Filicko, spokesman for the general prosecutor's office in Kosice told AFP.
"The charges include Csatary's responsibility for deportations of Kosice citizens to Germany," Filicko said.
Between November 1944 and January 1945, 500-700 people were murdered in Kosice, including 12 who were hanged in the town centre, the SME daily reported Thursday.
"Csatary, who was then a senior police officer, should be also held responsible for these crimes," a second citizen who filed charges against Csatary, but wished to remain anonymous, told the daily.
Slovak justice authorities have 30 days to decide whether to formally indict Cstarty on the complaints.
As a member of the "committee for cleaning the city of undesirable citizens", Csatary helped to draw up a list of some 1,200 Kosice locals who did not support the Nazi regime, SME reported.
Slovakia's Justice Minister Tomas Borec said Monday he wanted Csatary to be tried in his country, echoing a similar call by Slovakia's Jewish community last week.
According to the justice ministry, a Slovak court would most likely give Csatary life sentence.
In 1948, a court in then-Czechoslovakia sentenced him to death in absentia but the death penalty has since been banned in Slovakia.
Csatary, whose full name is Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, helped run the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, a town that was visited in April 1944 by Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Nazis' Final Solution, the Wiesenthal Center says.
While there between 1941 and 1944, Csatary beat and brutalized Jews and sent 16,000 to their deaths in Ukraine and to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, it said.
Currently under house arrest in Budapest, Csatary was arrested on July 18 in the Hungarian capital on information from the Wiesenthal Center.
He had fled to Canada after the war but apparently lived undisturbed in Hungary for about 15 years before he was arrested.

EJP