Prague  - Czech police reported Friday detaining David Duke, former leader of US extremist group the Ku Klux Klan, on suspicion of denying the Holocaust in a book.

Duke arrived in Prague earlier this week at the invitation of local neo-Nazis to publicize the Czech translation of of 1998 memoir My Awakening.

Police have charged him with denying in the book that the systematic mass murder of Jews and other ethnic groups by Nazi Germany during World War II ever took place, a hate crime in the Czech Republic punishable by up to three years in prison, police spokesman Jan Mikulovsky told the German Press Agency dpa.

Sydney - Austra

Hamburg  - A United Nations tribunal has offered to hear cases involving Somali pirates, or to assist other courts in interpreting laws that apply on the high seas, a German newspaper reported Wednesday.

On its website, Die Welt quoted Jose Luis Jesus, president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, saying his court in the German city of Hamburg was available to hear piracy cases.

"Piracy is dealt with in articles 100 to 107 of the UN Convention on Law of the Sea," he said. "That is why the tribunal is willing to try every case of piracy which the states desire it to hear."

Ankara - Turkish diplomats have undertaken initiatives to free two Turkish sailors who have been taken hostage by pirates just off the Nigerian coast, Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said on Wednesday.

The captain and second engineer of the Marshall Islands-flagged ship Aleyna Mercan were taken hostage after the ship was attacked by pirates of the Nigerian port of Onne on April 20, the Anadolu news agency reported. The two men were later taken off the ship.

Angelb