Arafat in 'irreversible coma'

2004-11-04 22:44

Clamart - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was "brain dead" on Thursday and breathing only thanks to artificial life-support systems, said a French medical source after conflicting reports as to whether Arafat was alive or dead.

In strictly technical terms, Arafat was "not dead,", the source told AFP on condition of confidentiality, adding that the 75-year-old leader had slipped into an irreversible coma and could only be maintained in his vegetative state through ventiliation machines.

The information followed a short statement by a senior French military official who said "Mr Arafat is not dead".

The Palestinian Authority president's condition was "complex," said General Christian Estripeau, the spokesperson for the French defence force's medical service, to reporters outside the Paris military hospital which had been tending to Arafat.

Reports of death denied

"The patient's condition needs appropriate treatment which required his being transferred to a unit suited to his pathology on the afternoon of Wednesday November 3," he said.

He refused to take questions, but said his statement had been prepared according to the wishes of Arafat's wife, Suha.

Earlier on Thursday, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker and Israeli media had reported that Arafat had died.

"Mr Arafat passed away a quarter of an hour ago," Juncker told reporters in Brussels at 16:40 GMT. His aides later retracted the statement.

French President Jacques Chirac paid an half-hour visit to the Percy Military Training Hospital where Arafat had been admitted.

He went on to Brussels for an meeting with Juncker and other EU leaders, and refused to answer journalists' questions as to whether Arafat was dead.

Palestinian officials in Paris and the West Bank spent the day denying the reports of Arafat's demise, but said their leader was in a "critical condition" in the hospital's intensive care unit.

'A sign of extreme gravity'

French medical sources said Arafat's health had suddenly and dramatically deteriorated on Wednesday while he was undergoing tests to determine the cause of an illness which prompted his medical evacuation to Paris last Friday.

A diagnosis of the illness has not been revealed.

A United States state department official later said: "The latest we have from the French is that he is in a critical, but semi-conscious, state."

A French medical source said an electroencephalogram (EEG), a type of brain scan, was carried out on Arafat on Thursday - itself "a sign of extreme gravity" - and that there was no reading of any cerebral activity.

- AFP