December 25, 2002	Wednesday	Shawwal 20, 1423

PARIS, Dec 24: Before leaving Paris for a Christmas holiday at Agadir, Morocco on Monday, French President Jacques Chirac ordered the country’s ambassador to Kuwait to undertake an investigation to determine the circumstances leading to the death of a French TV reporter in the emirate last week.

The ambassador was asked, according to the Elysee Palace, to obtain “all available information on the circumstances of this accident”.

Patrice Bourrat, 50, a veteran war correspondent for French network TF1, died on Saturday of wounds suffered during a military exercise.

He had just pushed his cameraman out of the path of a rapidly advancing US tank, apparently blinded in a cloud of dust.

But the TF1 said on Tuesday that Bourrat died several hours after the accident and possibly because of a wrong diagnosis by Kuwaiti military doctors.

Complaining of a severe pain in his side, Mr Bourrat was taken on Saturday evening to a US army hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from the rupture of his spleen.

It was during that operation - characterized as “routine” - performed by American military doctors that Mr Bourrat died from a “massive hemorrhage”.

French doctors say they are “astonished” by the way in which Bourrat’s case was handled, especially his death during an operation — considered “usually simple” — undertaken by the US army physicians.