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Austrians charge Irving for Holocaust denial

Updated: 25/Nov/2005 15:56

David Irving

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Controversial British historian David Irving is facing up to ten years in prison after an Austrian state prosecutor charged him with Holocaust denial.

Irving was caught last week in Hartberg Austria on his way to addressing a student meeting. He now faces trial for comments made in lectures given in Austria in 1989.

His arrest had been reported first last week by specialists of "documentation archive of Austria resistance" , an institution found after WWII by historians and concentration camp survivors, who read a report in Irvings website.

Serious offence

Unlike in many countries, such as England, denying the holocaust is a criminal offence in Austria and very strictly punished.

Otto Schneider, spokesman of Austrian state prosecutors told Austrian TV ORF: "The charge refers to two lectures Irving gave in 1989, in which he denied the existence of gas chambers".

Irving has two weeks to object to the charge. The 67-year-old was arrested on 11 November near the town of Hartberg in the southern province of Styria under a warrant issued in 1989 for violating a clause outlawing Holocaust denial in Austria's law prohibiting the Nazi Party.

Irving's lawyer Elmar Kresbach said his client was reviewing the charges and would then decide his next move.

Repeated problems

This is not the first time the controversial writer has been taken to court over his views.

The most prominent came in 2000 when a judge in London's High Court, dismissing a libel action brought by Irving against Professor Debora Lipstadt and her publishers, declared him to be "an active Holocaust denier... anti-Semitic and racist".

Irving had been in Austria last week to give a lecture to the extreme right student organisation "Olympia", which is reportedly deeply anti-Semitic and has an ideology close to that of the Nazis.

Vienna prosecutors said that on Friday a court will again check the charges against Irving, and decide whether to impose any further detention.

The move was welcomed by Stephen Smith, the chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Stressing the importance of the Austrian Laws, Smith said: “At a glance laws against Holocaust denial seem to rail against free speech. After all the crime is only words.

“Herein lies the danger. Behind the words sits a devious ideological intent. It demands the kind of actions that no one wants repeated. It is a covert call to complete what Hitler did not finish. It is incitement to genocide.”