12 June 2006

NUREMBERG - Police in Nuremberg dispersed a German neo-Nazi group that had dressed up in Iranian football shirts and handed out anti-Jewish leaflets on Sunday, just before Iran's World Cup match against Mexico.

The Bavarian minister in charge of the police, Guenther Beckstein, was the main speaker at a pro-Israel demonstration the same afternoon.

German organizers of the football tournament are worried that the country's small band of far-rightists will parade near games, seeking world attention for their claims that the Holocaust never happened.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused world outrage this year by doubting the Holocaust, but was praised by the neo-Nazis. In Tehran, an Ahmadinejad spokesman backtracked Sunday on a suggestion that the militant Iranian president might show up at the World Cup.

Slightly fewer than 200 far rightists marched Saturday with official permission in another World Cup venue city, Gelsenkirchen, and 16 defied a parade ban Sunday in Nuremberg, where dictator Adolf Hitler built an elaborate park for annual torch-lit Nazi rallies.

The same park contains the 41,000-seat stadium where the Mexico- Iran match was played.

With their minds focussed strictly on football, more than 12,000 elated Mexican fans and 7,500 Iranian fans gathered at the stadium. Those unable to obtain tickets could watch the game free on a giant TV screen elsewhere in the park.

City police spokesman Peter Groesch said the group of far-right men and women were moved along on a city street for breaching bye- laws. They had waved Iranian flags and demanded that the anti- Ahmadinejad demonstration be prohibited.

More than 1,000 people attended the later anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration organized by German Jewish groups and trade unionists.

They waved large Israeli flags as Beckstein said, "Let's act decisively against extremism and anti-Semitism whatever its form."

He said Germany as a whole could be counted on to stand by its Jewish citizens and the state of Israel.

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