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Arafat to convalesce in Tunisia
03/11/2004 23:46 - (SA)
Tunis - Ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will convalesce in
Tunisia after undergoing medical treatment in France, Palestinian
foreign minister Farouk Kaddoumi said on Wednesday.
"After undergoing treatment he will need time to rest," Kaddoumi
said before leaving for Paris in the company of other Palestinian
leaders. "He will be here in Tunis, soon, God willing."
Kaddoumi would not be drawn on whether Arafat, who is suffering
from a blood disorder, had been poisoned.
"The medical reports which will be published tomorrow (on Thursday)
will give us an explanation of his condition," he said.
The permanent Palestinian envoy in France, Leila Shahid, had on
Monday ruled out any poisoning of the 75-year-old leader saying
that any such speculations were "not serious".
Kaddoumi said that Arafat's condition was stable but added that
he still needed medical treatment and tests to find out what caused
his illness.
On Tuesday, the first medical bulletin issued by French doctors
confirmed that Arafat was not suffering from leukaemia, although it
failed to suggest any new hypothesis to explain his blood disorder.
Instead, tests have shown anomalies in his digestive functions.
Arafat was air-lifted to a military hospital outside Paris from
his Ramallah headquarters in the West Bank on Friday. It was the
first time in three years that he left Palestinian territory.
Arafat lived in exile in Tunis for 12 years, where the
headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organisation were located
between 1982 and 1994. His wife Suha and their daughter have lived in Paris and Tunis
since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September
2000.
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