A Hungarian man accused of war crimes during the Holocaust has been acquitted in Serbia.

Sandor Kepiro was alleged to have massacred Jewish, Roma and Serbian people at Novi Sad when he was a 28-year-old officer in the Hungarian gendarmerie.

The majority of the victims of that attack were shot after being led to the icy Danube River in northern Serbia.

The charges were quashed earlier today by a Budapest court on the grounds of there not being enough evidence.

Mr Kepiro was found guilty of involvement in the massacres during the Second World War, before the Nazis invaded Hungary, and after the end of the war when he was living in Argentina.

Mr Kepiro, now 97, is one of the men listed on a most wanted Nazis list issued by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. The centre's director, Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, said the acquittal was an outrageous decision.

Elan Steinberg, the vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, called the verdict a betrayal of the demands of justice.

"The anguish of those who suffered at the hands of the fascist Hungarian gendarmerie have not yet been relieved."