Peace conference?

Do I even have to point out the irony?

Friday, February 9, 2007 · Last updated 4:39 p.m. PT

Elie Wiesel accosted at S.F. hotel

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Shown in this file photo is Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel speaking to members of the media after addressing members of the Security Council on the crisis in Darfur, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2006, at United Nations headquarters. Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust scholar Eli Wiesel was dragged from an elevator and roughly accosted, possibly by a Holocaust denier, during a peace conference at a San Francisco hotel earlier this month, police said Friday, Feb. 9, 2007.(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

SAN FRANCISCO -- Nobel laureate and Holocaust scholar Elie Wiesel was dragged from an elevator and roughed up during a peace conference at a San Francisco hotel last week, police said Friday. The author was not injured.

The assailant approached Wiesel in an elevator Feb. 1 at the Argent Hotel and requested an interview, police Sgt. Neville Gittens said.

When Wiesel consented to talk in the hotel's lobby, the man insisted it be done in a hotel room and dragged the 78-year-old off the elevator on the sixth floor, Gittens said.

The assailant fled after Wiesel began to scream, and Wiesel went to the lobby and called police.

Gittens said police are investigating the incident as a crime. He said investigators were aware of a posting at an anti-Semitic Web site in which a man claimed responsibility for the attack, but declined to comment further.

Wiesel couldn't be immediately reached for comment at Boston University, where he teaches, or through his institute in New York.

Wiesel, who survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II, has worked for human rights in many parts of the world and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.