(JTA) — A man who was briefly imprisoned in Australia in 2009 in connection with the 1944 murder of a Jew in Hungary died at the age of 96.

Charles Zentai was detained as per the Hungarian government’s request for his extradition to answer questions on the 1944 murder in Budapest of 18-year-old Peter Balazs.

The request for the extradition of  was denied by the Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor and Zentai was freed.

Balazs was dragged from a tram in Budapest because he was not wearing the mandatory yellow Star of David. He was savagely beaten to death in an army barracks and his body dumped in the Danube. Balazs was living in Budapest under the protection of the Swiss government.

Zentai’s son Ernie Steiner told media: “My father was an extremely kind and gentle and loving man. He was falsely accused and we were never allowed to produce evidence of his innocence in Australia.”

In 2009 O’Connor determined that  Zentai should be surrendered to the Republic of Hungary to face prosecution for a war crimes offence, which allegedly occurred in 1944.

“The Australian Government takes international crime cooperation and allegations of criminal conduct, including war crimes, seriously”, O’Connor said at the time.

Zentai appealed. In February 2010 lawyers acting for Zentai, appealed to the Human Rights Commission to safeguard their client’s rights. In July 2010, Zentai won his appeal against his extradition to Hungary when Federal judge Justice Neil McKerracher ruled that the Federal Government did not have the power to extradite Zentai stating that the war crime charge did not exist in Hungary at the time of Balazs’s murder.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff said from Jerusalem: “The fact that Karoly (Charles) Zentai died a free man without being tried for his crimes is a testament to the complete failure of the Australian government to hold the Nazi war criminals and collaborators who found a refuge in Australia accountable for their role in the implementation of the Nazis’ Final Solution of European Jewry.

While Australia deserves credit for passing a special law to enable prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators living in the country, its judiciary failed to punish any of those brought to trial, and its political leadership closed down the Special Investigations Unit established to investigate these cases, long before it should have,” Zuroff added.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry wrote in a statement: “Australia has one of the finest and fairest legal systems in the world but as a society we have a long record of failure to address historical injustices until it is too late. For decades, government and non-government institutions turned a blind, but often knowing, eye to child sexual abuse, aboriginal deaths in custody, the stolen children and the entry of war criminals into Australia from conflicts all over the world.”

A 2006 US-government commissioned report accused Australia of having “an ambivalent” attitude to hunting Nazi war criminals in particular, and a “lack of the requisite political will.”

No accused Nazi war criminal has ever been punished in Australia, the council noted. “The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom all have a far better record than Australia in bringing war criminals to justice, extraditing them and stripping them of citizenship,” its statement read.

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