Assassins of Roma people given life sentence

Four men have been found guilty of murdering six Roma (gypsy) people, including a child in Hungary, in a spree of killings that the court considered an act of racist motivation, Three of the accused were given life terms without parole.

Following a two-year trial, life imprisonment was handed down to Árpád Kiss, István Kiss and Zsolt Petõ. The fourth defendant, István Csontos, who drove the other three to the crime scene, was given a 13-year jail sentence.

The four men were found guilty, by the Budapest District Court, of perpetrating racist murders in 2008 and 2009 among Hungary's largest ethnic minority, the Roma.

News agencies quoted the prosecutors as saying that the four accused, with neo-Nazi tendencies, from Debrecen in northeastern Hungary had run-ins with Roma in the past and had planned their attacks in a pub.

Their assaults on remote rural settlements in northeastern Hungary, carried out over a 13-month period, left the gypsy population terrified while the perpetrators remained on the loose until their arrests in August 2009.