PARIS, Nov 22 (AFP) - French doctors who carried out tests on the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat discovered no trace of any known poison, his nephew Nasser al-Qidwa said Monday, while adding that he could not rule out the possibility of poisoning.
After receiving the medical report on his uncle's death, Qidwa said there was still no clear cause of death and the poisoning theory could not be ruled out definitively, even though there was no clear evidence of it.
"I have not had the time to study the report and obviously I am not competent because I am not a doctor," he said.
"But two central points remain. There is no clear diagnosis of the reason for the death, and second the toxicological tests were made and no known poison was found."
Qidwa, who is also the Palestinian representative at the United Nations, was expected to deliver the 558-page report to a Palestinian ministerial committee which is looking into the causes of Arafat's death on November 11.
"A question mark remains for us because of the lack of a diagnosis," Qidwa said. Asked about poisoning, he went on: "I am not excluding this but not asserting it either. There is no proof."
A row broke out last week over access to the medical file, with lawyers for Arafat's widow Suha arguing that she alone has the right to see the report and to choose whether to divulge it.
France's strict medical secrecy laws mean that the exact cause of Arafat's death has never been made public, fuelling speculation in the Middle East that he was poisoned.
Qidwa said that "Arafat does not belong to a person or a family, but the whole Palestinian people. I will hand over the report to the Palestinian Authority, and a committee has been designated to study it.
"I can understand the feeling of a wife to keep the information and to remain the unique source but we have to consider the political view ... not only the personal," he said.
He said the report "contains all the details related to the medical history. It does not have anything new, no secrets, only the information we were told earlier."
For his part Faruq Qaddumi, who succeeded Arafat as head of the mainstream Palestinian Fatah movement, reaffirmed Monday his belief that the Palestinian leader had been poisoned.
"He died due to poison. All the treatments and medical examinations have ruled out all the illnesses that you could think of, like leukaemia or the loss of immunity," he said in Beirut.
"Why had all the blood platelets continued to disintegrate? There is no other reason," he told reporters at a news conference with Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud.
Last week doctors who treated Arafat at a French military hospital outside Paris were quoted in the authoritative daily Le Monde as saying he died of a blood clotting disorder called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC).
However the doctors said they had not detected the underlying cause of the condition, which could be a viral infection or a cancer. They had looked at the possibility of poison but had ruled it out, they said.
Arafat was airlifted from his offices in the West Bank town of Ramallah on October 29 and lapsed into a coma on November 3 from which he never emerged. He was declared dead early on November 11.
11/22/2004 17:55 GMT - AFP