Nazi who sent Jews to camps 'has no regrets'

The most wanted surviving Nazi war crimes suspect remains unapologetically anti-Semitic and insists he was "following orders" when organising the deportation of 16,000 Jews to Auschwitz.

Hungarian authorities arrested Laszlo Csatary on Tuesday after coming under international pressure to prosecute the 97-year-old, who has been under investigation and surveillance for 10 months.

Tibor Ibolya, the Hungarian state prosecutor, said that the former police chief, who has been a fugitive since 1948, was protesting his innocence. "One of his arguments in his defence is that he was obeying orders," he said.

Ibolya said that Csatary was still an anti-Semite and did not show any regret. "He doesn't relate to certain fellow human beings in what we would consider to be a normal way," Ibolya said.

Csatary was last weekend discovered to have been living in Budapest for 17 years. Prosecutors have charged him with organising the forced deportation of Jews to death camps while the police chief of Kosice, now in Slovakia, between 1941 and 1945. According to the indictment, on June 2, 1944, as he forced Jews on to trains to Auschwitz, he rejected a detainee's request to have a window cut in a wagon, where 80 people were crammed.

He is charged with illegal torture and faces a life sentence if convicted.