Gunshot Starts Panic As Sarkozy Leaves Israel

Bodyguards rushed Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the visiting French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to safety yesterday after an Israeli police officer shot himself in the head during a departure ceremony at Tel Aviv airport.

Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, were at the foot of the steps leading up to their aircraft when security guards heard a single gunshot. The two leaders appeared not to have heard anything but Bruni ran up the steps. Sarkozy was directed into the aircraft, and Olmert was rushed to his car, which was parked close by. Israel's president, Shimon Peres, who was also at the ceremony marking the end of Sarkozy's three-day visit, was led away.

Within moments the incident was over, and Olmert boarded the plane himself. Some reports suggested that the officer, from the border police, fell from a building and that his gun fired accidentally. Other accounts suggested he shot himself in the head. The officer was reported to be at least 100 meters from the aircraft.

"This was in no way an assassination attempt," an Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, told Reuters. He said the police officer had killed himself.

The incident came at a time of mounting concern over the ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. Two Palestinians, including a commander of the Islamic Jihad militant group, were killed during an Israeli military raid in Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, yesterday. Several hours later Islamic Jihad fired four rockets from Gaza towards the southern Israeli town of Sderot, slightly injuring two people.

The rocket fire came on the sixth day of what was supposed to be a ceasefire in Gaza. Hamas said it was sticking to the agreement but it was not clear whether Israel would respond. "It is essential for the ceasefire, for calm to be sustained," said the appointed Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, in Berlin.

The ceasefire is also threatened by a political crisis within Israel. Olmert faces the possible collapse of his ruling coalition today when politicians vote on a preliminary reading of a bill to dissolve the Knesset, Israel's parliament. The Labour party, a key force in the ruling coalition and led by the defence minister, Ehud Barak, has promised to vote in favor. Barak sees himself as a challenger for the premiership and last month called on Olmert to quit after embarrassing testimony was given in the latest corruption investigation against the prime minister.

Olmert has told members of his Kadima party he will sack labor ministers who support the bill, including Barak, who is not an MP.

"I won't accept a situation in which labor ministers are trying to topple the government yet staying in it," Olmert said at a Kadima meeting on Monday.

Early elections would probably see labor and Kadima lose out to the rightwing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.