Budapest:
Hungarian Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary, 97, number one on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's wanted list, has been taken into custody and charged, Budapest prosecutors said.
Csatary, accused by the Wiesenthal Center of having helped organise the deportation of some 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp during World War II, "has been taken into custody," the public prosecutors office said in a statement.
They added that Csatary, full name Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, a former senior police officer in Kosice, which at that time was in Hungary but is now in Slovakia, "has been charged with committing war crimes."
In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court condemned Csatary, who the Wiesenthal Center said was in charge of the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, to death in absentia.
But he had made it to Canada, where he worked as an art dealer in Montreal and Toronto until in the 1990s he was stripped of his citizenship there and was forced to flee.
He ended up in Budapest where he has lived undisturbed ever since until the Wiesenthal Center alerted Hungarian authorities last year, providing it with evidence it said implicated Csatary in war crimes.
British tabloid The Sun raised publicity of his case in a report at the weekend after tracking down the old man, photographing him and confronting him at his front door.