The Hungarian-born alleged World War II war criminal Charles Zentai, 87, who lives in Perth, Austria, was eligible for extradition to Hungary to face justice, an Australian court has ruled. Zentai, was arrested by Australian police in July 2005 and is accused of taking part in the fatal beating in November 1944 of Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest. At the time Zentai, was a 23-year-old warrant officer in the pro-Nazi Hungarian military, but argues that he left Budapest with his regiment the day before the murder. Balazs was travelling on a tram when he was detained for not wearing the yellow Star of David. He was tortured and killed in an army barracks and his body dumped in the Danube.
A Perth Federal Court judge backed a magistrate's decision last year that Zentai was eligible for extradition, but granted a seven-day stay of execution to allow his lawyers to appeal to the full Federal Court bench, local media said. Zentai, who moved to Perth after the war and became an Australian citizen, denies the allegation against him and says he was not in Hungary at the time. He has spent three years opposing attempts to extradite him to Hungary. He took a lie detector test in the effort to prove his innocence. Zentai is listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as one of the top-ten war criminals still at large and is accused of taking part in "manhunts, persecution, deportation and murder of Jews."
