SHANGHAI, June 16: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has previously called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’, said here on Friday there needed to be an independent investigation into the Holocaust. “Historical events need to be presently investigated by independent and impartial parties,” he said during a press briefing in Shanghai, referring to the Holocaust.

“A historical event that has the influence and many lasting political equations of the world needs to be investigated and researched by impartial and independent groups.”

“If it is true then this question should not be solved in Palestine,” he said, referring to the bitter, decades-old conflict that has its roots in the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Mr Ahmadinejad, who had been attending the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a regional security grouping, insisted that the ‘problem was not the Jews’, but the ‘Zionists, which have hidden behind Judaism’.

Zionism was a movement that began in the 19th century in response to anti-Semitism in Europe, but the term has since come to mean general support for the state of Israel.

Many Zionists were survivors of the Holocaust and helped found Israel.

Israel’s memorial to the estimated six million Jews who were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler on Friday denounced Ahmadinejad’s for making fresh anti-Semitic comments.

“Recent trends in Iran represent a clear feature of current anti-Semitism — the ties between Islamic radicals and Holocaust deniers,” said a spokeswoman for the Yad Vashem institute in Jerusalem.

T he hardline Iranian president has previously sparked international outrage by insisting that the Holocaust was a “myth” used to justify the creation of Israel and the Jewish state should be moved as far away as Alaska. Mr Ahmedinejad has also said that Israel “must be wiped off the map”. Ahmadinejad also took a swipe during his press conference on Friday at the United States, referring to the nation’s atomic bombing of Japan at the end of World War II.

“Pay attention to the fact that Hiroshima is only a few hundred kilometers away,” he said, referring to one of the Japanese cities that was bombed.—AFP