Jewish groups reject Holocaust-doubting bishop's apology

Bishop Richard Williamson, whose readmission to the Catholic church caused an international outcry, last night apologised for remarks in which he denied the scale of the Nazi Holocaust.

In a statement on the website of the Rome Catholic news agency Zenit, he said his views on the Holocaust were not those of an historian. They had been "formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available, and rarely expressed in public since." Williamson added: "To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologise."

He caused outrage by saying in a TV interview broadcast in January that there were no gas chambers in the Nazis' ­concentration camps. He also ­challenged the widely accepted figure of six million victims, saying he believed that no more than 300,000 Jews had died.

"I can truthfully say I regret ­having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them," Williamson said.

Some Jewish groups expressed disappointment at his statement. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said it was "not the kind of an apology that would end this matter" because it failed to address the central issue. More