University shut in Holocaust row

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An Italian university has closed down one of its campuses to prevent a planned lecture by a controversial French professor and Holocaust denier.

Robert Faurisson has been convicted five times in France for denying crimes against humanity.

He was due to speak at the University of Teramo in central Italy as part of a Masters course in Middle East studies.

But the university decided to close part of the campus to prevent him addressing students.

It said the "climate of tension" might endanger the safety of its students.

'Embarrassment'

Faurisson says that Nazi gas chambers are a fiction and that most of the Jews who were killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp died of natural causes.

Last year, he was one of several prominent Holocaust deniers who gathered to take part in a conference in Iran.

The University of Teramo's Professor Moffa, who organised the lecture, was formally warned to cancel the invitation but insisted he had a right to academic independence.

"Are you so convinced of your truths?" Mr Moffa was quoted as telling the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa. "Then why don't you come and pull him to pieces?"

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre issued a statement saying that the invitation to Faurisson was "an embarrassment to Italian academia".

"To welcome Faurisson [...] encourages a perverse propaganda to incite a new generation to anti-Semitism," it read, according to AP.

European interior ministers agreed last month to make it an offence to condone or grossly trivialise crimes of genocide - but only if the effect is incitement to violence or hatred.