Fourth gun attack in 15 years claims life of Palestinian invalid

The Israeli army said last night it was investigating the death of a paraplegic Palestinian who relatives said had been killed while drinking coffee after surviving three shooting attacks in the past 15 years.

The Israeli army said last night it was investigating the death of a paraplegic Palestinian who relatives said had been killed while drinking coffee after surviving three shooting attacks in the past 15 years.

Local Palestinians said that the man, Arafat Yaacoub, had used a wheelchair since being left paralysed from the waist down after he was shot in the back during clashes between Israelis and Palestinian militants in 1992.

Hundreds of mourners yesterday marched behind Mr Yaacoub's body and his wheelchair in a funeral procession through the Qalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem, near where the shooting took place. According to the residents, Mr Yaacoub, 31, was drinking coffee on Sunday near the entrance to the Qalandia camp when soldiers opened fire on stone-throwing Palestinian youths, and that a stray bullet had hit him in the head and killed him.

The camp is close to the main Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, which has been a periodic flashpoint since the present Palestinian uprising started more than three and a half years ago.

Mr Yaacoub's brother Adel said that his brother had first been wounded when he was shot in the leg while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. As a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement he was jailed for 10 months in 1991. It was a year later that he was shot three times in the back in the shooting that left him partially paralysed.

Now needing a wheelchair, Mr Yaacoub then left Fatah, his brother said, and took a job at a holistic medicine store in Ramallah. When he had saved enough money, he bought a special taxi he could drive with hand controls and began transporting passengers for a living. But two years ago he had been sitting in his taxi in a village west of Ramallah when it was hit by bullets from an Israeli tank, his brother said. One bullet struck him in the chest.

"They killed him many times," Adel Yaacoub said, but added: "God didn't want him to die because he wanted him to marry and have children." In recent years, he said, Mr Yaacoub had got married and had become the father of three children, including a newborn son.

The Israeli army said that troops in the area had fired on a group of people seeking to infiltrate the Atarot industrial zone and that in a separate incident "non-lethal means" had been used to disperse rioting Palestinians close to the Qalandia checkpoint.

Security sources said that rubber bullets had been used in the second incident and it was not yet clear in which incident Mr Yaacoub had met his death. "We are investigating," an army spokeswoman said.