Yasser Arafat vowed on Friday that the assassins of a leading PLO official in the Gaza Strip would not derail the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
Sources at PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, said Arafat ordered the arrest of several officials of his Fatah group from Gaza, but Arafat denied it. Arafat had summoned the officials to Tunis for investigation after the assassination of a Fatah leader in Gaza last month.The PLO chairman, winding up a two-day visit to Paris, absolved the militant Islamic Hamas movement of blame in Thursday's killing of moderate leader Assad Saftawi in Gaza City.
"Hamas sent me a message that they are innocent of this crime, which hurts them deeply," Arafat said. "Those who killed him are the bats of the night, not the spokesmen of the Palestinian people."
Arafat, on his first official visit to Europe since signing the peace accord last month, blamed extremists opposed to the accord for Saftawi's death, the third assassination of a leading PLO official in a month.
The PLO leader and his foreign minister, Farouk Khaddoumi, both said that the majority of the Palestinian opposition was democratic.