BUDAPEST, Hungary — A well-known German neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier who was on the run after skipping his jail sentence is arrested in Hungary on Monday, police say.
Horst Mahler, 81, a co-founder of the 1970s far-left Red Army Faction group who later swung violently far-right, is detained in the city of Sopron near the Austrian border.
Mahler received two concurrent prison terms of five and six years in 2009 for disputing that Nazis had systematically slaughtered six million European Jews during World War II.
Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany.
Mahler was temporarily released in 2015 because of ill health and was due to continue serving his prison sentence in the eastern city of Brandenburg on April 19 but failed to show up, according to German newspaper Taz.
Once a left-wing fanatic, Mahler joined Germany’s most radical extreme-right party, the NPD, between 2000 and 2003 before quitting because he found it “outdated.”
Mahler has called the Holocaust “the biggest lie in history,” praised the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, and given a Hitler salute to a Jewish journalist in an interview.
— AFP
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