The Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre has traced a suspected Nazi war criminal to Budapest, the Hungarian MTI news agency reported Thursday.

Sando Kepiro, presently 92 years old, was sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison by a Communist people's court in 1946 for war crimes, charges that Kepiro denies.

Kepiro is accused of participating in a massacre of 4,000 unarmed civilians (including 1,250 Jews) in Novisad as a gendarme with a Hungary Army unit allied with Nazi Germany. In addition, he is thought to have cooperated in the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps from the Serbian town of Wojwodina.

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In a spontaneous press conference outside his home in Budapest, Kepiro said he was present at the Novisad massacre but had not done any shooting. Hungarian soldiers shot civilians, he said, but not gendarmes like himself.

"At the time, I knew nothing of Auschwitz," he added, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

Efraim Zuroff, a leader of the Wiesenthal Centre, said in Budapest that he had brought Kepiro to the attention of the Hungarian military state attorney in August of this year, but the authorities responded that the court files from 1946 could not be found.

Zuroff expressed the hope that Kepiro would now be retried in Hungary. He added that Kepiro had been sentenced in 1944 in Belgrade for treason against the Hungarian army, but the sentence was overturned under the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March, 1944.

In the framework of its "Operation Last Chance," the Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem has for several years been pursuing in eastern Europe Nazi war criminals who have until now escaped legal prosecution.