Bucharest - Two Romanian civic rights groups on Wednesday petitioned for criminal charges against a prominent politician over his denial of the Jewish Holocaust in the country.
Two non-governmental organizations - the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism and Romani Crissi - said they filed the charges against the Social Democratic senator Dan Sova after he said that Jews were not persecuted in Romania during World War II.
Filed with the state prosecutor, the charges are the first against a politician for the denial of the Holocaust in Romania. The prosecutor is now to decide whether he will press the charges in court.
In an interview with the TV station Money Channel on Monday, Sova also downplayed the magnitude of a massacre of Jews in Iasi in 1941 and denied that any Romanian took part in it.
The country allied with Hitler's Germany during the conflict.
Some 380,000 Jews and 36,000 Roma were killed in Romania during then president Ion Antonescu's reign. Most perished in concentration camps in Transniestr, an area Romania seized with the Wehrmacht from the Soviet Union in 1941.
Some 13,000 Jews were killed alone in Iasi in June 1941. The survivors of the massacre subsequently suffered a grueling death of thirst and dehydration in the summer heat during their slow transport in sealed train coaches. - Sapa-dpa