LONDON (JTA) — Scottish police have been treating the overturning of 94 headstones in Edinburgh’s Piers Hill Jewish cemetery as a racial attack because only those in the Jewish section of the graveyard were vandalized.
The Jewish section has more than 600 graves, dating back some 50 years.
“This was the work of strong adults, not children,” police Sgt. Terry Imrie told the London Jewish Chronicle. “These gravestones are extremely heavy.”
Imrie said no one had claimed responsibility for the attack, which took place during Yom Kippur.
British Labor Party would outlaw denial
LONDON (JTA) — Opposition leaders here have said that if they are elected in 1997, they would make Holocaust denial a criminal offense.
The pledge by the Labor Party recently came in response to a lengthy campaign by Jewish groups such as the Board of Deputies and the Holocaust Education Trust.
A motion committing a future Labor government to such a law has the backing of the entire Labor leadership, a party official said.
The law, if passed, would reverse the policy of the current government, headed by Prime Minister John Major of the Conservative Party.
Home Secretary Michael Howard has repeatedly turned down calls to introduce such legislation, arguing that it would restrict freedom of speech and could increase racial tension.
Alleged Nazi ally faces new charges
PARIS (JTA) — Maurice Papon, the former French Cabinet member who faces trial for his role in deporting nearly 1,700 Jews to Nazi death camps, has been accused of causing the deaths of dozens of Algerians during pro-independence protests while he was Paris police chief in 1961.
An Algerian rights group known as The Foundation for May 8, 1945 said last week that Papon was responsible for the deaths of more than 100 people when he ordered the repression of a Paris demonstration in October 1961, during the war for Algerian independence from France. Algeria was granted independence in 1962.
Three people died and 64 were injured in the protest, according to official reports, but about 60 bodies were fished out of the Seine River and dozens more were found hanged in the Bois de Vincennes in eastern Paris. An aide to then-Prime Minister Michel Debre has since said that about 100 Algerians died in the protests.