week in southern Austria on charges of denying the Holocaust, police officials said.
Irving was arrested last Friday, November 11, during a routine check on a motorway in Styria province by police acting on a 1989 arrest warrant issued by a Vienna court, news reports said. He was apparently transferred to a prison in Graz.
Denying the Holocaust took place is a crime under Austrian law. If formally charged, tried and convicted on the charge, Irving could face up to 20 years in prison, Otto Schneider of the public prosecutor’s office told reporters.
The accusation are linked to speeches Irving delivered in 1989 in Vienna and in the southern town of Leoben. Irving has often faced allegations of spreading anti-Semitic and racist ideas. He is the author of nearly 30 books, including "Hitler’s War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.
GAS CHAMBERS
He told a libel hearing in London in 2000 that the Nazi gas chambers had never existed and that they were "completely fictitious". Irving lost that case and the judge branded him "an active Holocaust denier."
The Associated Press (AP) news agency quoted Prosecutor Schneider as saying it was unclear whether there "were sufficient legal grounds" to continue holding Irving on such a charge so many years after he allegedly made the anti-Holocaust comments in Austria.
A decision was expected by the end of next week, Schneider reportedly said. Austria is not the only country outside the United Kingdom where Irvin has troubles.
GERMAN COURT
In the early 1990s, a German court found him guilty of breaking laws forbidding the denial of
the Nazi extermination of Jews, and he was reportedly fined and barred from entering Germany.
In 1992 he was also barred from South Africa and Canada, where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom.
However in Hungary David Irving has been able to appear on state-owned television to promote some of his more controversial books.
In late 2003 he was invited by Istvan Csurka of the right wing Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIEP) to promote his book on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in a television show.
He portrayed the 1956 revolution as a workers’ uprising against a Jewish-dominated Communist regime. About 600,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust he denies took place. (With BosNewsLife Chief International Correspondent Stefan J. Bos in Budapest and reports from Austria).
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