Midday update

Holocaust denier Irving to be released early

David Irving in court in Vienna today
David Irving in court in Vienna. Photograph: Herbert Pfarrhofer/EPA
The far right British author and Nazi apologist David Irving should serve the rest of his three-year jail sentence for Holocaust denial on probation, an Austrian court ruled today.

Vienna's highest court granted Irving's appeal, meaning he will be released from prison before Christmas, the Austria Press Agency reported.

Irving said he was "fit and well" after serving more than a year in jail. He added that he would be calling for an academic boycott of German and Austrian historians until their governments stopped putting historians in prison.

Irving was jailed in February after he admitted denying the Holocaust in two speeches during a visit to Austria in 1989.

The speeches included a call for an end to the "gas chambers fairytale" and claims that Hitler had "helped" Europe's Jews and that the Holocaust was a myth.

At his trial in February, Irving said he had revised his opinion after seeing the personal files of Adolf Eichmann. Speaking in German, he told the court he now accepted that the Nazis had killed millions of Jews.

Austria has the world's toughest laws against denying the Holocaust, and Irving could have received a maximum of 10 years in prison.

In 2000, Irving sued the US Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel at the high court in London, losing the case. Charles Gray, the presiding judge in that case, wrote that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist".

In Germany in 1992, he was fined several thousand pounds for saying the Auschwitz gas chambers were a hoax.

Irving has contended in the past that most of the people who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz were not murdered but succumbed to diseases.

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