Laszlo Csatary, the Nazi war criminal who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted list, has been living peacefully in Hungary for the past 17 years, and under his own name.

But this weekend the past caught up with him in the shape of reporters from the British tabloid The Sun knocking on the door of his Budapest apartment and confronting him.

"No, no. Go Away," the paper quoted him as saying in the English picked up while living in Canada, the country he escaped to after World War II but which stripped him of his Canadian citizenship in 1997.

The reporters were acting on information provided to Hungarian authorities by the Nazi-hunting Wiesenthal Center in September last year.

Hungary's deputy public prosecutor Jeno Varga said on Monday that 10 months on, his office was "studying the information that has been submitted to us."

Csatary was a senior Hungarian police officer in the Slovakian city, then under Hungarian rule, where he was in charge of a Jewish ghetto.

While in the town, known as Kassa in Hungarian and Kaschau in German, he helped organize the deportation to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz of approximately 15,700 Jews from Kosice and the vicinity in the spring of 1944.

In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court condemned Csatary to death in absentia but he had made it to Canada.

Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter, handed over more evidence to Hungarian prosecutors last week.

In Budapest, he made no attempt to hide his identity, with the letter box for his flat in the Hungarian capital bearing his name for all to see.

French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld said on Monday he doubted Hungarian authorities would prosecute Csatary.

AFP