At the age of 98, the world’s most wanted surviving Nazi war criminal has been charged with taking part in the murders of 15,700 Jews during the Second World War.

Laszlo Csatary, who has been under house arrest in his native Hungary for a year, is expected to go on trial within three months. The indictment also says he is guilty of ‘torturing and murdering Jews’, but he insists he was merely an intermediary between Hungarian and German officials.

Csatary was the Royal Hungarian Police commander in the city of Kassa – now Kosice in Slovakia. As chief of a Jewish internment camp, he is said to have organised the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

In 1948 a Czech court condemned him to death in his absence for torturing Jews. But he fled to Canada and became an art dealer. He was stripped of Canadian citizenship in 1997.