Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel is closer to returning to Canada. In fact, a woman purported to be his wife said on an Internet site that he was in the country for about an hour.
The message was posted on the Internet saying that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service failed to send the jailed German-born man back to Canada.
The woman said the country where he has spent more than half his life would not take him this past weekend.
"I just got off the phone with Ernst. But listen to this — you will not believe it: INS agents took him by plane from Knoxville [Tenn.,] to Canada with a judge's order that he was barred from entering the U.S. for the next 20 years," Ingrid Rimland Zundel wrote on an Internet site.
"... Ernst was in Canada for about an hour. Lots of shouting, gesticulating and wringing of hands, and then they shipped him back," she wrote.
It's unclear whether Mr. Zundel crossed the border. Immigration Canada will not comment on Mr. Zundel because of Canada's Privacy Act.
He is being held in Batavia, N.Y., for overstaying a visa. The INS agents who jailed him for the past two weeks will say only that they plan to move him north. (An INS spokesman said last week that Mr. Zundel would be sent to his native Germany. The spokesman later said he was mistaken and that the plan was always to send him to Canada.)
Mr. Zundel came to Canada as a teenager. Though he gained landed-immigrant status, his attempts for citizenship were rebuffed because of his extremist views.
Frustrated by a never-ending series of hearings that he says was aimed at shutting him up, Mr. Zundel bitterly packed his bags and moved to Tennessee three years ago. He married a U.S. citizen and vowed never to set foot in Canada again.
Together, the couple continued to make their views known. Two weeks ago, Mr. Zundel was arrested by U.S. immigration agents.
Last year, Mr. Zundel told The Globe and Mail in an interview from Tennessee that he considered Canada's efforts to contain him tiresome and irrelevant.
"You're talking to the new Ernst Zundel," he said. "They used to accuse me of Holocaust denial. Well, now I'm in Canada-denial. I have put Canada behind me."
In 2001, he sold his Toronto home — a library for the like-minded and the site of the occasional pipe bomb by his enemies — for $358,000.
The Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith, and Ontario Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty have vocally opposed Mr. Zundel's return to Canada in recent days.
Mr. Zundel does not believe that German Nazis killed millions of Jews during the Second World War. Propagating this viewpoint has got him in legal hot water many times and brought him the notoriety he craves.
Before leaving Canada, he sent books, tapes and papers down south, though it is unclear whether all of the offensive materials have left Canada.
He once waxed nostalgic about the propaganda he used to prepare and circulate in his Toronto home. "Every nook and cranny of the Zündel-Haus was filled to the rafters with books, booklets, files, video- and audiotapes," he once wrote.
In Canada, outraged groups have been lobbying Immigration Minister Denis Coderre to prevent his return. Mr. Zundel's long absence makes it unclear as to whether he retains his landed-immigrant status.
There also are outstanding legal issues. After he moved to the United States, the Canadian Human Rights Commission ruled that Mr. Zundel's Web site spreads hate. Yet it continues to be published.
"If he returns to Canada, we will look at what we can do, and that includes initiating contempt proceedings," commission spokesman Daniel Lavoie said Tuesday. "Essentially, he has an order of a tribunal against him, and he hasn't complied with it. He could be jailed if he doesn't comply."
In 1996, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service deemed Mr. Zundel a threat to national security. Prior to that he had been convicted on a criminal charge of spreading false news, but that conviction was thrown out on appeal.
Mr. Zundel's problems do not end in North America.
In the early 1990s, he was jailed during a short visit to Germany because of that country's strict antihate laws. He was fined $9,000.
It is unclear whether he has paid the money or whether he would face sanctions if sent back.
