Richard Williamson, the 68-year-old Roman Catholic bishop at the centre of an international row over the denial of the Holocaust, has asked for forgiveness, a German-language report by the zenit.org Catholic internet news agency said Thursday.
It quoted Williamson as saying his views had been "only those of a non-historian" based on information available 20 years ago. The agency said the statement amounted to a retraction of his views, dpa reported.
It said Williamson had asked all those who had been outraged by his words "for forgiveness before God."
Williamson, in an interview with Swedish television last November, had said he believed that "up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them in gas chambers."
"I believe there were no gas chambers during World War II," he said.
Williamson had arrived back in his native Britain Wednesday after being asked to leave Argentina, and was driven off in a black limousine to an unknown destination.
Argentina's Interior Minister Florencio Randazzo said Argentina was expelling Williamson because his remarks insulted "Argentinians, the Jewish people and all of humanity."
The Cambridge-educated cleric who converted from the Anglican Church of England to Catholicism in 1971, was among four ultra- traditionalist members of the Society of Saint Pius X bishops whose 1988 excommunication Pope Benedict XVI revoked last month.
The decision, just days after his most recent Holocaust denial, unleashed waves of indignation from Jewish and Catholic communities worldwide.
The protest was particularly strong in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Pope Benedict XVI, who is German, to "clarify unambiguously that there could be no denial."
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