Mannheim, Germany - German prosecutors said Thursday they will apply for the extradition of Frederick Toben, 64, who was arrested this week in London on an international warrant for Holocaust denial. Toben, an Australian citizen of German extraction, was convicted on the charge in Mannheim, Germany, in 1999, but an appeal court ordered a retrial. He then left Germany while he was free on bail.
The prosecutor's office at Mannheim, which wages Germany's fight against international cases of Holocaust denial, said it was waiting to be officially informed of Toben's detention at Heathrow Airport.
It would then formally apply for his extradition, a spokeswoman said.
British police arrested Toben on a European Union arrest warrant issued in Mannheim as he was in transit on a flight from Dubai to the United States.
Toben has written pamphlets and websites denying that millions of Jews were killed at the Nazi death camp in Holocaust.
Those claims, which ignore clear historical evidence, are a central plank of neo-Nazi movements.
At the retrial he faces charges of sedition, criminal insult and insulting the memory of the dead.
At the initial trial he was sentenced to 10 months in prison.
A London judge refused Toben bail Wednesday, and he was remanded in custody until a new extradition hearing.
In 2006, Toben was a speaker at a controversial two-day conference in Tehran organized by the Iranian government and attended by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
There, he described as "mere puffery" the assertion that Jews were killed by the Nazis.
