An aged senior figure in Hungary's former communist regime avoided jail Thursday over the deadly crackdown of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising after an earlier sentence was reduced at retrial.
Bela Biszku, 94, was sentenced to five years and six months in jail in May 2014 for being "actively involved" in decisions to order security forces to open fire on crowds in two incidents in 1956 in which some 50 people died.
But in Thursday's verdict in Budapest, he was given a jail term of two years suspended for three years, with the judge ruling his involvement in the decisions to shoot was not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Confined to a wheelchair and hard of hearing, Biszku, listening to the proceedings on headphones, was however convicted of war crimes, denial of communist crimes and misuse of ammunition.
Prosecutors had called for life imprisonment and Biszku's defence lawyers for an acquittal. The new sentence can be appealed, but for now Biszku is a free man, having been under house arrest since September 2012.
In total during the uprising, more than 2,000 civilians were killed after Soviet tanks rolled into the country. Some 300 were executed, more than 20,000 were jailed and 200,000 fled the country.
Biszku, who later became interior minister, was the first of Hungary's 1956 leaders to face criminal investigation. Communism ended in Hungary in 1990 and it joined the European Union in 2004.
In 2011, the conservative government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban modified a law to enable people suspected of involvement in the 1956 reprisals to be tried for war crimes.