18 November 2004	Thursday	05 Shawwal 1425

RAMALLAH, Nov 17: The Palestinian Authority (PA) constituted a committee on Wednesday to investigate reasons behind the death of Yasser Arafat. Interim President Rawhi Fattouh told reporters in Ramallah that committee chairman, Health Minister Jawad Tibi, will also head a delegation that will travel to France in an attempt to receive the French medical report on Arafat.

Arafat died in hospital near Paris on November 11 from a still- undisclosed illness. French authorities say they can only release the medical report to his immediate family.

Fattouh said he met the French Consul General in Jerusalem and officially requested the medical report. "We are still waiting for an answer," he said. Speculation in the Palestinian territories has it that Arafat was poisoned and failure of the French hospital to release the medical report to the PA has only added fuel to the rumours.

DOCTORS' VERSION: Doctors who treated Palestinian President Yasser Arafat believe he died of a blood clotting disorder and ruled out poisoning, Le Monde newspaper reported on Wednesday.

French medical secrecy laws mean that the report on Arafat's death has been communicated only to his immediate family, resulting in a spate of rumours in the Arab world that he may have been poisoned.

The uncertainty led Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorei to announce a special committee on Wednesday to probe the cause of the late leader's death, and a delegation was reported to be preparing to leave Ramallah for Paris to ask the French government to hand over Arafat's medical file.

Le Monde, quoting "very good sources," said doctors believe that he died of a condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). It described the condition as "the complete disruption of the mechanisms which normally assure proper blood clotting ... It can lead to major internal bleeding and possible death."

It said it was internal lesions associated with DIC which led to the sudden deterioration of Arafat's condition four days after his arrival at a Paris military hospital on October 29.

He lapsed into a coma on November 3 from which he never surfaced, and was declared dead early on November 11. It quoted doctors as saying DIC is a condition rather than an actual disease, and can be set off in a person of Arafat's age by either an infection or a cancer.

However, they had found no indication of either in this case. "We also worked on the question of poisoning, using sophisticated techniques, before concluding with a negative," it quoted a doctor as saying.

An online medical dictionary describes DIC as a condition under which "blood clotting mechanisms are activated throughout the body instead of being localized to an area of injury.

"Small blood clots form throughout the body, and eventually the blood clotting factors are used up and not available to form clots at sites of real tissue injury." -dpa/AFP