BUCHAREST (AFP)---A Romanian senator stirred an outcry Tuesday after minimising a Holocaust massacre and denying the responsibility of pro-Nazi marshal Ion Antonescu in the World War II killings of Jews.   

Opposition Social Democrat Dan Sova said "historical data show that a total of 24 Jews were killed during the Iasi pogrom by the German army."    

He also claimed on a television programme that "no Jew suffered on Romanian territory, thanks to marshal Antonescu".   

Historians say 13,000-15,000 Jews from Iasi, northeast Romania, were murdered in the streets or asphyxiated in "death trains" in June and July 1941 in one of the worst single Holocaust massacres.   

A total of 280,000 to 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died in Romania and the territories under its control, according to an international historians' commission headed by Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel.   

The Elie Wiesel Institute for the study of the Holocaust in Romania said it "expresses disagreement and outrage over the Holocaust denial statements made by the Social Democrat senator Dan Sova during a televised programme".   

"Opinions such as those voiced by senator Sova offend the memory of  Romanian Holocaust victims and breech the law on Holocaust denial."   

Sova later said he had not intended to "deny the suffering of the Jewish people or the responsibility of the Romanian authorities of the time"   

"What I wanted to say was that it was not the Romanians' wish but an unfortunate historical context and the Nazi policy that triggered those events," he added.