A Jewish group on Wednesday offered to help Hungarian authorities prosecute a Hungarian man accused of the World War II killings of more than 1,000 Jews and Serbs in a Serbian town.

The Union of Jewish Communities in Serbia said it could offer several witnesses and wartime documents of the 1942 massacre of some 800 Jews and 400 Serbs in Novi Sad, north of Belgrade, allegedly conducted by Hungarian Nazi troops that controlled the area at the time.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Nazi hunters said in a statement that one of those responsible was Hungarian citizen Sandor Kepiro, now 93.
Kepiro, who was a gendarmerie lieutenant in Novi Sad at the time, emigrated to Argentina after the war but returned to Hungary in 1996.

The Jewish group said it "strongly supports demands that Sandor Kepiro be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for the massacre that was conducted under his command in 1942 in Novi Sad."
Hungarian prosecutors recently opened an investigation into Kepiro following demands by the Wiesenthal Center and after researchers in Belgrade found a copy of a 1944 Hungarian court verdict that found him guilty of disloyalty to Hungary.

Last month, the Budapest Municipal Court said the 1944 ruling sentencing Kepiro to 10 years in prison could not be enforced because a retrial shortly afterward annulled the sentence.

Kepiro has denied the accusations, saying he was a scapegoat in a show trial.