An 87-year-old man denied he was a war criminal after an Australian magistrate ordered him yesterday to face an extradition hearing on a charge that he murdered a Jewish teenager in Hungary during World War II.
Former Hungarian soldier Charles Zentai, an Australian citizen, is listed by the Jerusalem-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre among its top 10 most wanted Nazis.
Hungary accuses Zentai of torturing and murdering 18-year-old Peter Balazs in a Budapest army barracks on November 8, 1944, for failing to wear a star that would identify him as a Jew.
A magistrate in the west coast city of Perth, where Zentai now lives, ordered that his three-day extradition hearing beginning August 18.
Zentai, who migrated to Australia in 1950, did not attend the preliminary hearing, but he told Australian Broadcasting Corp television Tuesday he was "definitely not" involved in the death and had left the Budapest barracks the day before Balazs was killed.
"The last few years of my life are completely ruined," he told the ABC, referring to the pressure that the allegations have put on his family.
He said most of the evidence against him came from confessions by two former Hungarian army officers that were extracted by what he called "sadist interrogators" of the Hungarian communist government's secret police in 1947.
One of the former officers was executed for the murder; the other died after serving a prison sentence.
Hungary applied for the retired grandfather's extradition in 2005. Zentai has pursued a number of appeals, with the High Court of Australia ruling in April against his final constitutional challenge to a magistrate's authority to order his extradition.
