TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran has defied an international outcry as it held a conference that questioned the truth of the Holocaust and was attended by number of controversial Western "revisionist" historians.
Iran says the conference is aimed at providing a forum for historians to air any view about the Holocaust but Western countries have countered the event smacks of denial of the mass slaughter of six million Jews in World War II.
Some of the most notorious Westerners who have downplayed the scale of the Holocaust were attending the event, including French professor Robert Faurisson and German-born Australian Fredrick Toeben.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, in his opening address, styled the conference as a scientific forum that would seek to find answers to the questioning of the Holocaust by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the truth of the Holocaust, at one point describing it as a "myth" and casting doubt on the scale of the killings.
"The simple question of the president of Iran: 'If the Holocaust is a historical event why can it not be researched?' set off a a wave of accusations against Iran without trying to find a logical answer," said Mottaki on Monday.
"The basic aim of this conference is not to deny or to prove the Holocaust but is to provide an opportunity for researchers from Europe to give their views about this historical phenomenon," he added.
Toeben, who maintains the existence of gas chambers is an "outright lie" and brought with him a model of the Treblinka extermination camp to this end, praised Ahmadinejad's stance on the Holocaust.
"He has clearly seen the importance the Holocaust has for the rest of the world, which is beholden to the Holocaust as a dogma, as an unquestioning dogma," he told AFP before giving his paper on "The Holocaust: A Murder Weapon".
David Duke, a US white supremacist and former Klu Klux Klan member, said he believed it was "scandalous" that Europeans could be sent to prison for expressing opinions about the Holocaust.
"I think that Ahmadinejad is a very courageous man to talk about some of these issues," he said.
Other participants at the "Study of the Holocaust: A Global Perspective" included other Western "revisionists" along with Iranian "experts" and members of an anti-Zionist Jewish ultra-Orthodox sect which rejects the existence of Israel.
Iran had refused to disclose the identity of the participants before Monday's opening of the two-day meeting, saying they risked having their passports confiscated if their home countries found out.
Khaled Kasab Mahameed, an Israeli Arab who wanted to speak out against Holocaust denial at the conference, meanwhile said in Nazareth he had been denied a visa to enter Iran.
The Islamic republic insists that it is well positioned to hold a conference on the Holocaust and angrily rejects charges of anti- Semitism, pointing to the continued existence in Iran of a community of 25,000 Jews.
However after a call by Ahmadinejad for Israel to be "wiped from the map" and amid continued concerns over the Iranian nuclear programme, Western countries have lost little time in savaging the event.
The United States denounced the conference, Germany summoned the Iranian charge d'affaires while France warned it would condemn the meeting with the utmost firmness if it propagated revisionist ideas.
The conference is the latest brush with controversy for the Islamic republic, which is already facing UN sanctions for failing to agree to halt sensitive nuclear work.
Historians of the Third Reich, basing their figures on original Nazi documents, generally believe around six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, although some estimates are slightly lower or higher. Hitler's regime also killed millions of non-Jews.
It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in a dozen European countries, including Germany and Austria.
David Irving, a British "revisionist" who attempted to argue that the toll was greatly exaggerated and to play down Hitler's role, was jailed by a Vienna court for three years in February for denying the Holocaust.