Arafat's government denies role in killing of land dealer

MR KHALED alKidreh, Mr Yasser Arafat's Attorney General, insists that the Palestinian Authority had nothing "directly or indirectly…

MR KHALED alKidreh, Mr Yasser Arafat's Attorney General, insists that the Palestinian Authority had nothing "directly or indirectly" to do with the brutal murder of the land dealer Mr Farid Bashiti.

But both the victim's grieving family, and the Israeli authorities investigating the affair, are having trouble believing him. A preliminary Israeli report pins the blame firmly on one of Mr Arafat's West Bank security forces. And the information revealed so far points strongly in the direction of Mr Bashiti having been the victim of summary justice, murdered for having dared to broker the sale of Palestinian land to the Israelis.

Consider the evidence. Early last week, the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Justice, Mr Freih Abu Medein, warned that Palestinians selling land to the Jews would face the death penalty. The announcement was prompted, among other things, by the fact that some of the land at Har Homa in southeast Jerusalem - where Israel is building 6,500 Jewish homes, to the fury of the Palestinians was sold to Israelis by its private Palestinian owners in the 1970s.

Later last week, it emerged that an Armenian archbishop had sold property in East Jerusalem to an American Jewish millionaire, who in turn handed it over to a Jewish study centre run by a right wing Israeli member of the Knesset. Mr Bashiti, a Palestinian who had worked for decades as a land dealer and estate agent, reportedly dealing with the Israeli state land registry and private Jewish purchasers, is said to have been a good friend of the archbishop.

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Last Thursday, Mr Bashiti was reportedly invited to meet, at an East Jerusalem hotel, a Palestinian woman purportedly interested in buying an apartment. Israel suspects the woman was working for the Palestinian Authority, and that she lured him out of the hotel, to the city of Ramallah - beyond Israeli jurisdiction and inside Mr Arafat's territory. On Friday morning, Mr Bashiti's body was found by a Ramallah roadside.

And Mr Abu Medein, though saying he did not support murder, reacted by remarking that the incident underlined that "nobody will accept a traitor".

Indeed, while Mr Bashiti's body has been handed over to Israel for postmortem examination, the Palestinian Muslim authorities are making it clear that he will not be given a Muslim burial. The Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem is reported to have said in a Friday sermon: "There is a Jew with a Muslim birth certificate who sells land. He is dead. One must not pray for him, or bury him a Muslim cemetery."