see Yasser Arafat focus

Arafat buried in chaotic scenes

By Mohammed Assadi

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RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Yasser Arafat has been buried in a chaotic scene of grief and gunfire at the compound where he spent his final years encircled by the Israeli army and powerless to realise his dream of a Palestinian state.

Firing into the air, Palestinian security men struggled to remove Arafat's body from a helicopter that flew in from Egypt and was quickly surrounded by a surging crowd of thousands at his Muqata headquarters, chanting his name.

The security men placed the coffin on a vehicle, climbed on top of it and held on tightly as it plied its way through a dense throng of weeping mourners who still managed to pull off the Palestinian flag draping the casket.

"With our blood and soul we redeem you, Abu Ammar," the crowd chanted, using the nom de guerre of their leader, who fought for decades for a state he never achieved.

At least four Palestinians were wounded, apparently by shots fired by the security forces or gunmen.

Arafat's body had been due to lie in state ahead of Friday's burial, but a Palestinian official said it was taken directly to the tree-shaded grave site of white marble instead.

"He was buried ahead of time because of the emotion of the crowd. We had no choice," one official told Reuters.

A Muslim cleric poured soil over the casket.

Arafat, a former guerrilla who became a Third World liberation icon and won a Nobel Peace Prize only to sink into renewed conflict with Israel, died at age 75 in a French hospital on Thursday of an undetermined disease.

The chaotic scenes in Ramallah were in high contrast to a funeral service earlier at a Cairo airbase, where the public was kept away and even some world leaders were shut out by mistake by over-zealous Egyptian guards.

A few kilometres from the burial site, an explosion in a car killed two people in a reminder of the violence in the region.

A video grab from Egypt TV shows Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's coffin, draped in a Palestinian flag, being carried by horse-drawn gun carriage to an Egyptian air base in a funeral ceremony attended by world leaders. Photo: REUTERS/EGYPT TV

ARAB LEADERS HONOUR ARAFAT

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, accompanied by Palestinian and Arab leaders including Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, led the mourners in Cairo.

Arafat's widow Suha, who had lived apart from him for the last few years of his life, watched the procession from a black car which drove alongside. Accompanied by their 9-year-old daughter Zahwa, Suha wept at the airbase.

The last-minute arrival of Assad, whose father Hafez had a troubled relationship with Arafat because of the Palestinian leader's attempts to keep the Palestinian movement independent of Arab governments, came as a surprise.

The United States sent a second-ranking State Department official, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, to the Cairo ceremony in a slight attesting to its boycott of Arafat as an "obstacle to peace", an accusation he denied.

Israel, on high security alert, dispatched no one at all. "I do not think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people," Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said.

Arafat left behind a people in a twilight zone between direct occupation and statehood, running their own affairs but surrounded and laid low by Israeli military crackdowns on a four-year-old revolt by Palestinian militants.

Palestinians have named a collective leadership comprised mainly of veteran moderates from Arafat's circle, reviving world hopes of a return to peacemaking that Israel had ruled out as long as the man it called "a master terrorist" was in charge.

But his interim successors will be challenged by a popular younger militant generation fed up with old guard corruption and futility in dealings with Israel, raising concern of a power vacuum that could trump any diplomacy in the near term.

Israeli forces surrounding Ramallah had effectively confined Arafat to the Muqata, battered by Israeli raids after suicide bombings in the Jewish state, for the past 2-1/2 years until he fell seriously ill two weeks ago and was airlifted to Paris.

Israel ruled out an Arafat grave in Arab East Jerusalem, calculating this would strengthen Palestinians' claim to a future capital in the part of the city that Israel captured in the 1967 war and annexed in a move not recognised internationally.

The Palestinian Authority declared a 40-day mourning period.

Palestinian officials urged Israel to revive stalled talks. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said it could be a "turning point" for peace if Arafat's successors ended violence.

But Sharon, signalling scant hope they would swing the Palestinian street behind peacemaking, also said he would pursue a unilateral plan to quit Gaza and keep much of the West Bank, stripping Palestinians of land they want for a viable state.

Arafat returned from exile in 1994 after interim peace deals that gave Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Israel's Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, later assassinated by a Jewish ultranationalist.

But a final peace summit aimed at hatching a Palestinian state failed in 2000, pitching the region back into bloodshed.