Holocaust denier Horst Mahler, one of the leaders of Germany's far-right movement, has been arrested in Hungary, the German daily 'Tageszeitung' reported on Monday, citing a spokesman of the Munich Prosecution Service. However, Hungarian officials denied the report.
The 81-year-old Mahler, who during the 1970s rose to prominence when he served as an attorney for members of the left-wing terror group RAF he had co-founded, disappeared in April, after being ordered to resume his prison sentence in Brandenburg/Havel where he had been incarcerated until August 2015. However, Mahler failed to show up at the facility on 19 April.
On Friday, Mahler - who during the 1990s and early 2000s was one of the leading German neo-Nazis - published a statement via supporters in which he said that he had asked "the leader of the Hungarian Nation, Viktor Orbán, to grant me asylum in Hungary for being persecuted politically." On Monday, a Hungarian government spokesman denied that Mahler had applied for political asylum and added: "Even if here were to apply for something like, it is legally excluded that the immigration agency would deal with the substance of such a request."
Between 2000 and 2003, Horst Mahler was a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). Since 2003, he has repeatedly been convicted of incitement to hatred and Holocaust denial and served much of a twelve-year prison sentence. In February 2009, he was sentenced by a Munich court to six years in jail, and a court in Potsdam sentenced him to an additional five years for Holocaust denial and the banalization of Nazi war crimes, which is a crime under German law.
Mahler was judged an escape risk and the sentence was carried out immediately. He was temporarily released in August 2015 owing to ill health.
