CAIRO - Egypt's foreign minister demanded on Tuesday that Israel open an official inquiry into claims in a documentary film that Israeli troops had executed Egyptian prisoners during the 1967 war.
"Israel is obliged to immediately conduct an inquiry into the incidents mentioned in the documentary ... and to communicate the results to Egypt, Ahmed Abul Gheit said in a messsage to his Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, reported by the state news agency MENA.
He added that those accused should be put on trial.
But his comments drew a frosty reaction from the Israeli foreign ministry.
"Israel hopes that the matter of this documentary can be closed and dropped from the news. That would be in everyone's interest," a ministry spokeswoman said.
Abul Gheit said that, in 1995, Egypt had also demanded an inquiry into reports from Israeli sources that Egyptian prisoners had been killed during the 1956 Suez Crisis, during which Israel invaded Egypt, along with Britain and France.
MENA said Abul Gheit had written to Livni after viewing the documentary, a copy of which was sent to Egypt last week, and was "waiting for a response from Israel."
Late last month, Israeli public television broadcast the documentary on the Shaked commando in which it said 250 Egyptian PoWs were killed by the unit in the El-Arish area of the Sinai peninsula.
Last week, however, the director of the film admitted to mistakenly identifying as Egyptians, Palestinian fighters who were killed in combat.
Israel has repeatedly denied that its soldiers killed Egyptian prisoners during the 1967 Six Day War.
The soldiers' then commander and current national infrastructure minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, has vehemently denied that his unit killed Egyptian PoWs, saying instead it had killed Palestinian fighters in combat.
The documentary has raised a storm of protest in Egypt, one of only two Arab countries to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, with an influential parliamentary panel threatening to review Cairo's ties with the Jewish state.
03/13/2007 18:16 GMT