Serbia investigates World War Two genocide suspect

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia's war crimes prosecutor on Wednesday requested an investigation into a 94-year-old Hungarian suspected of committing genocide against Jews and Serbs in World War Two.

Sandor Kepiro is suspected of taking part in a raid by Hungarian forces in January 1942 in northern Serbia "when, in an attempt to destroy members of the Jewish and Serbian national groups, they killed at least 2,000 of them," the prosecutor's office said.

Serbia has started gathering evidence and archive data on Kepiro on a request from Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.

The prosecutor's office said it had evidence of the mass killing of civilians in the northern town of Novi Sad. They had been killed at their homes, on streets, playgrounds and by the Danube river, where they were pushed through holes in the ice, either while still alive or having been shot.

Kepiro, according to the prosecutor's office, was a gendarme captain who commanded a group of street patrols that killed at least 42 Serb and Jewish civilians, 11 of them children.

It suggested the Serbian justice ministry should request his extradition from Hungary once an investigative judge had completed the requested probe.

(Reporting by Ljilja Cvekic, Editing by Mark Trevelyan)