AUSTRIA:British author David Irving was released on probation from a Viennese prison yesterday 10 months after being jailed for three years for denying the Holocaust, a breach of Austrian law.
Austria's highest appeals court ruled yesterday that Irving (68) could serve the rest of his sentence outside prison because of his clean criminal record and the length of time passed since the incident in question. He bragged ahead of the one-day trial last February he was so confident of being acquitted that he had booked a first-class plane ticket back to London that evening. But he was convicted of breaching a 1946 law that punishes Holocaust deniers or Nazi glorifiers and sent to prison.
The charges concerned speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he minimised Hitler's role in the Holocaust and said the gas chambers in Auschwitz camp never existed. Members of Austria's Jewish community questioned the revised sentence, calling Irving "an icon of neo-Nazis".