Power move as Arafat fights for his life

AS Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was fighting for his life in a French hospital last night after slipping into a coma, a senior official said some of his powers had been handed to his prime minister.

The 75-year-old leader, who embodies the Palestinian struggle for statehood, went into a coma overnight at the Percy military hospital in Clamart where he has been treated since last week.

Aides said he was in a critical condition but they and a French hospital spokesman denied he was dead. They also dismissed reports that he was brain dead, but said they were becoming increasingly pessimistic about his health.

"President Arafat does not have cardiac arrest or heart failure," Ashraf al-Kurdi, Mr Arafat's Jordanian doctor said. "He is still alive. He is not clinically dead. There is no brain death, but his condition is deteriorating. Because there has been no diagnosis, we don't know what's wrong with him."

A senior Palestinian official said: "President Arafat is in very serious condition. He is still in a coma. The sense people are getting is that they are increasingly pessimistic."

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, a senior Palestinian official said Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie, a leading moderate, had taken over some of Mr Arafat's powers for security and financing.

Mr Arafat has not named a successor and has been reluctant to cede any powers.

Palestinian security services were due to hold an emergency meeting in the evening at Mr Arafat's shell-battered headquarters in Ramallah, security sources said.

The slide into illness of the former guerrilla leader who has dominated the Palestinian scene for four decades has raised fears of chaos among Palestinians waging a four-year-old uprising. The death of a leader Israel and Washington see as an obstacle to peace could also shuffle the cards in the Middle East conflict.

Palestinian officials issued conflicting reports throughout the day and at one point Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, speaking on arrival at a European Union summit, announced Mr Arafat had died. He later retracted his statement.

"Mr Arafat has not died," said a spokesman for the Percy military hospital in Clamart, a suburb southwest of Paris, where the Palestinian leader has been undergoing treatment.

Doctors carrying out tests on Mr Arafat since he was airlifted to France last Friday still did not know what was wrong with him, although they have ruled out leukaemia, aides said.

Asked about the reports that Mr Arafat had been declared dead, US President George Bush told a news conference: "My first reaction is God bless his soul. And my second reaction is we will continue to work for a free Palestinian state that's at peace with Israel."

Mr Arafat's immune system appeared weak as his health, which had at first stabilised after he arrived at the hospital, suddenly deteriorated on Wednesday, the aides said. He was transferred to the intensive care unit on Wednesday at around 5pm. "He has no immunity whatsoever," one aide said, adding he had slipped into the coma around 2am yesterday.

Both Washington and Israel accuse Mr Arafat of fomenting violence in the uprising against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank that broke out in 2000, a charge he denies.

Until he was airlifted to France, Mr Arafat had been effectively confined to his shell-shattered Ramallah headquarters by Israeli forces for two-and-a-half years. French President Jacques Chirac visited Mr Arafat yesterday afternoon. He "saw Yasser Arafat and his wife, to whom he expressed his best wishes", the president's office said.

Mr Chirac also met members of the Palestinian Authority and doctors "who are doing everything possible for the health of the president", it added.

Mr Arafat's true condition has remained a mystery, with Palestinians issuing conflicting reports about his health and medical officials mostly keeping mum.

The senior Palestinian official with close access to the French medical team insisted Mr Arafat was comatose but would not say when he lost consciousness.

The French TV quoted an anonymous French medical source saying Mr Arafat was in an "irreversible coma" and "intubated" a process involving threading a tube down the windpipe to the lungs, often to connect a respirator.

But Mr Arafat's aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said Mr Arafat's life was not in danger, although he conceded that the Palestinian leader's condition was "critical and serious".

Dr Christian Estripeau of the military hospital said: "The clinical situation of the first days following admission has become more complex.

"The state of health of the patient requires appropriate treatment that required his transfer to a unit adapted to his pathology."