Austria arrests former neo-Nazi leader Gottfried Kuessel over website

Former Austrian neo-Nazi leader Gottfried Kuessel has been arrested in connection with a probe into a website targeted by the country's strict anti-Nazi law.

1:10AM BST 13 Apr 2011

Mr Kuessel, 52, former leader of the now-banned neo-Nazi group VAPO, was believed to be one of the main figures behind the alpen-donau.info website, a key forum for Austria's neo-Nazi movement that was shut down in March.

Half a dozen house searches were conducted late on Monday in Vienna and southern Styria province, during which investigators seized documents, computers, hard-disks, weapons and Nazi paraphernalia, Vienna prosecution spokesman Thomas Vecsey said.

Mr Kuessel and a second person were arrested overnight, he added.

The prosecution said it had received help from US investigators to gain access to the website's servers, which were based in the United States and were long out of reach for the Austrian authorities.

Mr Kuessel was the founder and leader of the Volkstreue Ausserparlamentarische Opposition group (extra-parliamentary opposition loyal to the people), before it was banned under Austria's anti-Nazi law in the 1990s.

The 52-year-old, who has described himself as a "national socialist", has made repeated comments in the past denying the Holocaust and even denounced the diary of Anne Frank as a fabrication.

Sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1993 for Nazi propaganda, he saw his term extended to 11 years over a procedural problem but was released in 1999 after six years for good conduct.

Justice Minister Claudia Bandion-Ortner welcomed news of the arrests on the margins of an EU meeting in Luxembourg, telling the Austria Press Agency: "This operation has been going on long enough."

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann also expressed satisfaction, noting however that it was "frightening for our country" that some people continued to uphold far-right ideology, after what the country went through during the Second World War.