Arafat doubts

Press, 20 October 1981, Page 8

Arafat doubts

NZPA-Reuter Beirut The Palestinian commando leader, Yasser Arafat, who publicly praised the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, privately expressed mixed feelings, according to a Lebanese journalist who was with him when he heard the news. Micheline Hazou, of the Beirut English-language weekly “Monday Morning,” who was accompanying Mr Arafat on a tour of the Far East said his first comment was: “This is wfiat happens to people who betray the Palestinian cause.”

But later during a stopover in Karachi, he said: “I cannot say I am sad about his death, because his policies and his actions were wrong. But on the personal level he was a friend and had been a friend for a long time.” In a statement issued in Damascus at the time, Mr Arafat praised “this operation by the great people of Egypt” which had “proved that the Palestinian cause lives on in their conscience."

Mr Arafat’s approval of the assassination shocked some Western leaders, and Austria said it did not want a Palestine Liberation .Organisation representative in Vienna because the delegate would represent Mr Arafat.