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