A Palestinian Fatah activist during a pro-Arafat rally in the West Bank city of Nablus. (Reuters)

Clamart (France), Oct. 30 (Reuters): Yasser Arafat underwent a battery of medical tests in France today and senior aides said there was no immediate risk of the 75-year-old Palestinian leader dying despite his serious condition.

Leila Shahid, the permanent Palestinian envoy to Paris, said after a day of brain and body scans and blood checks that there was nothing so far to prove he had leukaemia.

Arafat arrived in a military hospital in the Paris suburb of Clamart yesterday after a six-hour trip from his shell-battered compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Shahid, addressing the media outside the hospital after his first full day of tests, said that Arafat was ?much better both physically and psychologically? and she strongly refuted speculation that he was suffering from leukaemia.

?The tests already carried out exclude any possibility of leukaemia, and I say it again, any possibility of leukaemia,? she said, speaking in French. ?There are other possibilities and the doctors are still examining.?

The Palestinian president, effectively confined to his offices by Israeli forces for the past two-and-a-half years, agreed to fly to France only after Israel promised to allow him to return to the West Bank following treatment.

Arafat went into the French hospital with an abnormally low count of blood platelets ? a condition that can be caused by leukaemia ? but the number of platelets had since doubled, one Palestinian official said.

The French army health department issued a statement saying a bill of health would be made public as soon as it was complete ? without giving a date ? and that visitors beyond his family and his closest aides were being refused for Arafat?s comfort.

That was the only official comment from the French side.

Palestinian officials said requests for visits by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who knows Arafat well after a stint as an EU peace envoy, had been turned down.

Palestinian aide Nabil Abu Rdainah said nothing conclusive in terms of medical test results was likely before Wednesday, while another official with the Palestinian delegation in Paris sought to offer some reassurance on his condition.

?The doctors say it is serious but they do not feel there is an imminent threat to his life,? the official, who declined to be named, said. ?Most of the time he is asleep but he is not in a coma and when he wakes up he is aware of his surroundings.