VIENNA (AFP)--- Austria is to expel British Holocaust-denier David Irving and to ban him from ever returning to the country now that his prison term here has been reduced, a police official told AFP Thursday.

"A residency ban will be decreed against Irving in the light of yesterday’s verdict," immigration policeman Wilfried Covarnik said.

An Austrian appeals court on Wednesday ruled that Irving should be released from prison and serve the remainder of his three-year sentence on probation, setting the stage for him to be freed.

Asked to explain the decree, Covarnik said it would forbid any stay in Austria, even an airport transit.

"He can not set a foot, even a toe, ever in Austria again," Covarnik said.

Meanwhile, Irving told AFP in a telephone interview from the prison where he is being held that he would be leaving Vienna for London on Thursday at 5:15 pm.

"Austria is a piss-poor little country. They say that they want to prevent me from coming back. I have no interest in coming back," Irving said.

He said it had been "a great shock to find myself arrested or kidnapped for what I said" 17 years ago.

Not released immediately

Irving failed to win release Wednesday as authorities held him, pending deportation proceedings.

Irving, 68, has already served 13 months in jail, after being arrested in November 2005. He was sentenced to three years in February this year after being found guilty on three counts of Holocaust denial in remarks he had made in Austria in 1989.

Irving’s lawyer, Herbert Schaller, said there was no need for a residency ban as Irving "never wants to set foot in Austria again."

Herbert Schaller, Irving's lawyer, served in the army under the Nazis during World War II. The 83-year-old man is well-known in far-right circles and has been dubbed the "neo-Nazi lawyer" by the local press after defending a number of prominent Holocaust deniers such as Ernst Zuendel. Irving’s change of lawyer from the respected Elmar Kresbach to the aging Schaller came amid reports that the historian has run out of cash. Joseph Byron, EJP

Irving’s lawyers had argued that his sentence should be reduced, while the prosecution had asked the appeals court to extend the prison term.

In presenting the ruling, chief judge Ernst Maurer cited the "exceptionally long time since the crime" as well as Irving’s argument that he no longer denies the Holocaust took place, the Austrian news agency (APA) reported.

Wrong judge ?

The opposition Social Democrat party’s justice spokesman Hannes Jarolim charged that Maurer was the wrong judge for the case, as he had links to Austria’s far-right, xenophobic Freedom Party.

Irving was clearly relieved in court saying "Thank you your honor" in German to the judge and then saying in English to a woman acquaintance in the court, "Now I get a kiss," APA reported.
The British Press Association news agency quoted him as saying, "I’m returning to England. I’m fit and well but feeling sorry for my family."

He also said he was calling for an "academic boycott until the German and Austrian governments stop putting historians in prison."

A court in September had upheld Irving’s conviction, levied after a one-day trial on February 20 at which he pleaded guilty to a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry.

But Irving had insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving was also on trial for saying the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews was not the work of the Nazis, but of "unknown" people who had dressed up as stormtroopers, and that Adolf Hitler had in fact protected the Jews.

He was found guilty on all three denial counts by an eight-person jury.
Irving was prosecuted under an Austrian law targeting those who "deny the genocide by the National Socialists or other National Socialist crimes against humanity."

Austria is among 11 countries that have laws against denying the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were slaughtered by Nazi Germany, mainly in the later years of World War II.

Irving became notorious worldwide for attempting to establish, against the evidence, that Hitler was not party to the Holocaust and that the number of Jews slain by the Nazis was greatly exaggerated.

In 2000, Irving lost a high-profile libel case against US historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom he had sued when she called him a Holocaust denier.