Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad triggered new international outcry by saying the tumour of the state of Israel should be relocated to Europe.

Ahmadinejad, who in October said arch-enemy Israel must be "wiped off the map", said that if Germany and Austria believed Jews were massacred during World War II, a state of Israel should be established on their soil.

"You believe the Jews were oppressed, why should the Palestinian Muslims have to pay the price?" he asked in an interview with Iranian state television's Arabic-language satellite channel, Al-Alam.

"You oppressed them, so give a part of Europe to the Zionist regime so they can establish any government they want. We would support it," he said, according to a transcript of his original Farsi-language comments given to AFP.

"So, Germany and Austria, come and give one, two or any number of your provinces to the Zionist regime so they can create a country there... and the problem will be solved at its root," he said.

"Why do they insist on imposing themselves on other powers and creating a tumour so there is always tension and conflict?"

Ahmadinejad, a straight-talking former commando who swept to the presidency after a shock election win in June, is no stranger to controversy.

State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli called the Iranian leader's remarks on Israel "appalling and reprehensible."

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also issued a reaction Thursday expressing shock at Ahmadinejad's remarks.

Annan noted that only last month the UN General Assembly passed a resolution which "rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or in part".

In Ahmadinejad's interview, he referred to the Holocaust as a matter of belief, and raised the issue of revisionist historians -- who attempt to establish that figures on the number of Jews killed by the Nazis are wildly exaggerated -- being prosecuted in Europe.

"Is it not true that European countries insist that they committed a Jewish genocide? They say that Hitler burned millions of Jews in furnaces... and exiled them," he said.

"Then because the Jews have been oppressed during the Second World War, therefore they (the Europeans) have to support the occupying regime of al-Quds (Jerusalem). We do not accept this."

Official Iranian media frequently carry sympathetic interviews with Holocaust revisionists, and the regime itself also refuses to recognise Israel.

Ahmadinejad also proposed "a referendum in Palestine for all the original Palestinians" to decide on the future of what is now Israel, the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

But he said "the best solution is resistance so that the enemies of the Palestinians accept the reality and the right of the Palestinian people to have land."

He was speaking in the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia where he was attending a summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

PHOTO CAPTION

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, right, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005. (AP)