- A notorious Holocaust denier who was on the run for two years was finally arrested, police say.
- Vincent Reynouard fled France after being convicted and ended up in a tiny Scottish village.
A French Holocaust denier who hid from authorities for two years was finally pinned down in a tiny Scottish fishing village, according to multiple reports.
Police Scotland confirmed to Insider that, in cooperation with French police, they had arrested 53-year-old Vincent Reynouard in Anstruther, Fife, on November 10.
Reynouard was sentenced to four months in prison in a Paris court in late 2020, and given a further six months in January 2021, according to the Associated Press. But after being sentenced he fled to the UK, where he ended up in Fife, a picturesque coastal village with a population of just under 4,000 people.
Reynouard's most recent conviction was in relation to antisemitic social media posts, the AP reported.
Unconfirmed posts by a verified account in his name, seen by Insider on hard-right platform Gab, suggest he had been in hiding for a year, living rent-free with an elderly lady there and offering tutoring in exchange for food.
Insider has chosen not to link to the feed, which has repeated and lengthy posts questioning aspects of the Holocaust. Holocaust denial has been a crime in France since 1990.
While there is no specific law against Holocaust denial in the UK, Scottish police were persuaded to help their French counterparts in finding and arresting Reynouard, according to Agence France-Presse.
French newspaper Libération has identified him as a key player in an influential antisemitic network.
According to the UK's Campaign Against Antisemitism, Reynaud's antisemitic activities span three decades — first coming to the attention of the authorities in 1991, when he was convicted of distributing leaflets denying the existence of concentration camp gas chambers, the group said.
In 1997, while still in France, he was fired from his job as a math teacher after the school found revisionist material on his work computers, Scottish newspaper The Herald reported. He also gave students math problems around concentration camp mortality rates, according to the paper.
Reynouard's name hit the headlines in 2020, when a WWII memorial was vandalised in a French town that had been the site of a massacre by Nazi occupiers, per Libération. The graffiti read "Reynouard was right" and sparked outrage from President Emmanuel Macron, the paper reported.
Reynouard is still a prolific poster on social media sites such as VKontakte and Gab, according to Gen. Jean-Philippe Reiland, head of France's Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crimes.
"He still broadcasts many hate messages on the internet where he has a large audience," Reiland told Le Point.
The Gab account in Reynouard's name identified by Insider was posting up until November 9, the day before Reynouard was arrested. One recent post discussed at length what was spuriously described as "The Myth of Gas Trucks" in Nazi Germany.