JEDDAH, 14 November 2004 — Pressure is growing on the French government to order the military authorities to publish full details of the death of Yasser Arafat, amid persistent speculation about the causes of his fatal illness.
“We are not authorized to provide any further information,” a spokesman for the Percy Military Hospital, in Clamart, southwest of Paris, where Arafat died said in a telephone interview yesterday. “If there is any additional information it will be communicated to the family of the deceased.”
The five-line communiqué issued by the hospital Thursday did not mention the cause of Arafat’s death. This was in violation of French law that forbids the issuing of a death certificate without specifying the cause of death.
French diplomatic sources say they do not know why there was such an omission. But they insist that the brief communiqué had been written and authorized in close consultation with Arafat’s wife Suha and his nephew Nasser Al-Quddwah. It seems that the two, for unknown reasons, did not want the cause of death to be stated in the communiqué.
Meanwhile, Arab media are full of reports concerning various attempts by the Israeli secret services Mossad to poison Arafat in Ramallah. One story taken by several Arabic newspapers claims that Arafat had employed a special taster to check his food before he ate it. That, of course, would not exclude slow poisoning over a long period, something that could not be checked by a taster on the spot.
Another story is built around an alleged plot to poison Arafat through the official papers that he handled every day.
Most of the late leader’s senior aides, including Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath and special adviser Muhammad Rashid have excluded the possibility of poisoning. But none have been able to state the cause of death, admitting that they have no information on the subject.
Arafat’s personal physician for 22 years D. Ashraf Al Kurd has publicly called for an investigation into the causes of death, and criticized the French authorities for what he terms “strange attitude.” The question remain: Who wants to keep the cause of Arafat’s death a secret and why?
