Arafat poisoned?
BY CORKY SIEMASZKO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Candles are lit for Yasser Arafat at Paris hospital, where he lies in a coma.
A Palenstian diplomat accused the Israelis yesterday of poisoning Yasser Arafat.
"The doctors until now could not diagnose precisely what is wrong with him, but it is believed there is a poison," Ali Kazak, who heads the Palestinian delegation to Australia, told the Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne.
"It could be poison because they have checked everything, and his body is in good health, there is no cancer, it is not leukemia."
Arafat's doctor, Ashraf Kurdi, told the Al Jazeera satellite TV network that, "Arafat's health condition makes poisoning a strong possibility."
Israelis, who gave Arafat safe passage from his West Bank compound to a French military hospital last week, denied the charge.
"It's absolute nonsense; it's completely ridiculous," an Israeli government source said. Kurdi has not yet diagnosed Arafat's mysterious blood ailment, and last night the 75-year-old Palestinian leader was hovering "between life and death."
"He is in a coma," Leila Shahid, the Palestinian envoy to France, said. "We don't know the type, but it's a reversible coma. He may or may not wake up. All vital organs are functioning."
But other Arafat aides insisted their 75-year-old leader was brain dead and on life support. They said his wife, Suha, is weighing whether to pull the plug.
"He is being aided by respiratory machines and his condition appears irreversible," a high-ranking Palestinian official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Arafat jealously guarded his power and never appointed a successor. As he lay near death, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's No. 2 in the Palestine Liberation Organization, were taking the reins of the government.
Originally published on November 6, 2004
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