NAKED STRONG CURVATURE SINGULARITIES IN SZEKERES SPACETIMES

We investigate the occurrence and nature of naked singularities in the Szekeres spacetimes. These spacetimes represent irrotational dust. Th ey do not have any Killing vectors and they are generalizations of the Tolman-Bondi-Lemaitre spacetimes. It is shown that in these spacetime s there exist naked singularities that satisfy both the limiting focus ing condition and the strong limiting focusing condition. The implicat ions of this result for the cosmic censorship hypothesis are discussed .