news - arafat reported to be brain dead
AP - A gravely ill Yasser Arafat reportedly slipped into a coma and is now brain dead as anxious Palestinian officials hold meetings on how to prevent unrest in the event of the 75-year-old leader's death.
A swirl of reports saying Arafat had died were quashed by doctors at a French military hospital where the Palestinian leader has been treated since being airlifted to France last week.
Arafat's aides, however, acknowledged that his condition was very serious.
A senior Palestinian official said Arafat was in a coma in the intensive care unit.
Arafat's chief of staff, Ramzi Khoury, called an Associated Press reporter and said: "I am standing next to the president's bed, he is in grave condition".
Outside the hospital, 50 wellwishers held a vigil late into the evening. Some held candles, others Arafat portraits; a large Palestinian flag hung from the hospital's outer wall.
"It tears your heart up," said Mahmod Nimr, 36, an unemployed Palestinian by the main gate of the hospital.
"I can't see someone taking his place."
On a day of high drama, there were persistent and contradictory reports about Arafat's condition.
Luxembourg's prime minister announced at a summit of European leaders in Brussels that Arafat had died, but his spokesman later said it had been a "misunderstanding".
The Israeli television network Channel Two reported that Arafat was brain dead but remained on life support. But Arafat's personal physician, Dr Ashraf Kurdi, said that a brain scan showed Arafat had not suffered a haemorrhage or stroke, and "has no type of brain death".
Brain death occurs when the brain stops working, making it impossible for the body to maintain its own vital functions, such as breathing. It is irreversible. Patients can be kept alive by a machine, as long as the heart is still beating and nothing is seriously wrong with the rest of the body.
French television station LCI quoted an anonymous French medical official as saying Arafat was in an "irreversible coma" and "intubated" - a process that involves threading a tube down the windpipe to the lungs to connect it to a life-support machine to help the patient breathe.
To be on life-support, a patient must be unconscious, but not necessarily brain dead or even in a coma.
A Palestinian official in Gaza who is close to Arafat's wife, Suha, said she told him Arafat fell unconscious after receiving a strong anaesthetic for a biopsy.
