Notorious Holocaust denier is arrested in fishing village

Frenchman who broke anti-nazi laws ‘living under false identity’

ONE of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers has been arrested in a quiet Scots fishing village, two years after fleeing France following a conviction under strict anti-nazi laws.

Vincent Reynouard was apprehended at an address in the Anstruther area of Fife last Thursday, on a Trade and Co-operation Agreement warrant issued in France, police confirmed to The Herald.

Reports in France suggest he had been working as a private tutor while living under a false identity.

His arrest comes after a two-year search for his whereabouts led by France’s Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crimes (OCLCH), which began after the memorial of Oradoursur-glane, where Nazi troops killed and destroyed an entire village in June 1944, was vandalised by graffiti which read “Reynouard is right”.

The 53-year-old has multiple convictions in his native France, spanning decades, for comments he has made denying the existence of the Holocaust and distortion of the Oradour-sur-glane massacre.

The denial of Nazi atrocities has been a crime in France since 1990, when The Gayssot Act, proposed by French Communist politician Jean-claude Gayssot, was enacted to combat revisionist views denying the existence of gas chambers and other Nazi crimes.

The act makes it a crime to “contest” or dispute certain “crimes against humanity”, as defined by the Nuremberg Charter.

Although more than 25 European countries, including France, have laws that address the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, there is no specific law outlawing it in the UK.

General Jean-philippe Reiland, head of the OCLCH, told news agency AFP that despite there being no Holocaust denial law in the UK, the French inter-ministerial service was able to “convince the British” to go after Reynouard thanks to a judgment of the Caen Court of Appeal in 2015.