The notorious Nazi sympathiser, Gerd Honsik,

The notorious Nazi sympathiser, Gerd Honsik, was arrested in Málaga yesterday on an international arrest warrant issued in Austria. Honsik was sentenced to serve eighteen months in jail by a Vienna court in 1992 for repeatedly denying the holocaust and that the Third Reich used gas chambers to exterminate the Jewish people. He never served this sentence after escaping to Spain where he set up home.

The opinions were expressed between 1986 and 1989 in his book 'The Absolution of Hitler', and in the 'Halt' magazine in which he stated that: "there is absolutely no evidence of the existence of gas chambers" and "the chimney of the supposed Auschwitz gas chamber rises just thirty sad centimetres above a one-storey house."

The Spanish High Court turned down an application to extradite Honsik in November 1995 on the grounds that legislation outlawing justifying genocide was not introduced in Spain until May 1995, and does not apply to crimes committed before this date.