Iran Holocaust Cartoons Contest's top awards go to Iranian, French artists

French cartoonist Zeon and Iranian artist Arash Forughi won first prizes at Iran's 2nd International Holocaust Cartoons Contest, Tehran Times daily reported on Tuesday.

Zeon, who was reportedly arrested for his anti-Zionist work in March 2015, was awarded 12,000 U.S. dollars in the cartoon section and Forughi received a cash prize of 7,000 U.S. dollars in the caricature category at Tehran Art Bureau on Monday, according to the report.

The contest was held on Monday under two topics of "West's ban on freedom of speech about the Holocaust" and "Palestinians and the Holocaust."

"One of the subjects we asked cartoonists to focus on was why the Western countries arrest any scholar who doubts the Holocaust," the secretary of the competition, Masoud Shojaee-Tabatabaee was quoted as saying.

"The other subject was why Palestinians should pay for the Holocaust," he said.

In the cartoon section, the second prize went to Jitet Koestana from Indonesia and the third prize was presented to Mahmud Nazari from Iran.

Also, Iranian cartoonist Hadi Asadi received second prize in the caricature section while India's Pamarthy Shankar, the winner of the Grand Prix World Press Cartoon Award in 2015, won third prize, according to Tehran Times.

Participants from Belgium, Morocco and Turkey also won honorable mention.

Some Iranian senior officials have frequently denied the exaggerations about the genocide of Jews and other groups in the Holocaust during World War II, questioning the reliability of its historical evidence. Endit