Austria appeals for longer jail term for Irving

VIENNA - Austria's state prosecutor filed an appeal today to lengthen the three-year jail term given to British historian David Irving for denying the Holocaust during a 1989 lecture tour in the country.

Irving had already appealed for a reduction in the sentence in his Vienna criminal court trial yesterday, arguing that he had changed his mind after further research in the past 15 years and now acknowledged that Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews.

Walter Geyer, spokesman for the state prosecutor's office, said it had lodged an appeal to have the sentence increased. The prosecutor had argued that Irving had only pretended to moderate his views to try to escape a jail term.

Geyer said it would be up to Vienna's supreme court to decide whether and by how much the term should be lengthened. A hearing was not likely before the second half of 2006.

Denying the Holocaust in Austria -- which was part of the Third Reich from 1938 to 1945 and contributed a significant number of top Nazi leaders including Adolf Hitler -- is punishable by a prison term of one to 10 years.

Irving, 67, arrested on a 16-year-old warrant during a return visit to Austria last November, said his jail sentence had shocked him, and filed an appeal for it to be shortened as soon as the one-day trial closed yesterday.

He had pleaded guilty, hoping for a suspended sentence. But presiding Judge Peter Liebetreu said the court did not consider the defendant to "have genuinely changed his mind. The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law".

Irving acknowledged denying in 1989 that there was an organised Nazi genocide against Jews and that gas chambers existed, but said he changed his mind in 1991 after reading the personal files of Adolf Eichmann, the chief organiser of the Holocaust.

"The Nazis did murder millions of Jews," he told the court.

Defence lawyer Elmar Kresbach asked the court for leniency because he said Irving thought differently now and posed no threat to a stable Austrian democracy six decades after World War Two.

State prosecutor Michael Klackl said Irving was a serial "falsifier of history" and had been cast as a martyr for free speech by neo-Nazis who would not grant such rights if they were in power.

- REUTERS