PARIS (EJP)--- Roger Garaudy, a French communist intellectual who denied that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during World War II, has died aged 98, officials said Friday.

The renowned intellectual came to prominence as a Holocaust denier with his anti-Zionist work The Founding Myths of Israel Politics in 1998, in which he disputed the fact that Nazi gas chambers were used to kill Jews during World War II, for which claims he was fined 120,000 francs ($18,000, €14,200) by a Paris court in 1998. He is reported to have died at his home in the suburbs of Paris on Wednesday morning.

"Intellectually he ended miserably in the lowest Holocaust denial,” said Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations.

He died on Wednesday in the Paris suburb of Chennevieres, local officials said.

His death was first announced by the website of the far right wing French political group Equality and Reconciliation, a further sign of how the once respected academic had become associated with marginal political factions in later life, since he began espousing revisionist theories in 1996.

His rewriting of the events of  WWII came in contrast to his own experience of it, for which he was awarded war medals, including one for acts of resistance in Nazi-occupied France.

Having joined the French resistance during the war, he was held in Algeria as a prisoner of war of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy France administration.

Before adopting revisionist views, he was a leading member of the French Communist party, converting first to Catholicism on his expulsion in 1970, and later Islam in 1980. His controversial writings were not universally abhorred however, and he enjoyed increasing popularity in the Muslim world in later years.

A member of the first National Assembly in France, he served as its Vice President from 1956-1958, before joining the Senate, he abandoned the world of politics for philosophy in 1962. His split with the Communist party was cemented in 1968, when he wrote two books challenging the modern relevance of the movement, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Becoming increasingly radicalised as a Muslim, following his subsequent conversion to Islam, he claimed in his inaugural revisionist work that “Judaism is not called into question, only Israel politics”, attempting to draw a distinction between anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment.

However, continuing to define his theories by saying he “simply revised the findings of the Nuremberg trial and the principles on which it was based” only served to cement his reputation as an increasingly peripheral Holocaust denier, who called in to question Nazi genocide and the existence of gas chambers.