His lawyer said he had serious burns, lacerations and had been savagely beaten. A crowd of 7, 000 jammed a hillside cemetery in the West Bank city of Nablus yesterday for the funeral of Mahmoud Jamayyal, who died after being tortured by Palestinian police. Jamayyal was "one of our own", one mourner said, and his funeral was a bitter mark on the road to increasing anger at the Palestinian Authority (PA), welcomed only seven months ago. Jamayyal, 27, was declared brain dead on Monday after being taken to hospital from prison in Nablus. He was very afraid and nervous," Mr Muhamed said later.Making detours in case Iraqi intelligence officers followed them, the two men drove Mr Ahmed to a "safe house" outside Atlanta and introduced him to a lawyer.Thomas Fischer, a spokesman for the local offices of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service, said last night that the athlete had not yet formally applied for asylum.An "associate" of Mr Ahmed had contacted the immigration service on his behalf and the athlete was likely to be interviewed this week, he said.Mr Ahmed finished 23rd of 28 competitors in the 99kg class of the weightlifting event.. Then I made a run for it from the Olympic village," he said.He said he had been helped by two members of a local anti-Saddam group, one of them reportedly a Briton, who had first approached him with a message offering to assist him.One of them, Omar Muhamed, a student at a technical college in Atlanta, said he had posed as an Argentine athlete last week, approached Mr Ahmed in the Olympic village where the athletes are staying, and slipped him a letter in Arabic offering to help him defect.Mr Ahmed later sprinted from the Olympic village to a nearby petrol station where Mr Muhamed and Francis Brooke, reportedly a Londoner now resident in the US, were waiting in a car "He was running, sweating. He said: "I have seen with my own eyes [Saddam's] cousin, Ali Majid, shoot innocent civilians." Mr Ahmed did not say whether or not he was a Shia Muslim, a majority in the Basra area where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, has violently put down several uprisings in recent years.The athlete said he tricked Iraqi intelligence officers, accredited as team officials but acting as "minders", before a team trip to Atlanta's zoo on Wednesday "I told them I had to go back to my room to change clothes. The Iraqi weightlifter who carried his country's flag at the Olympics opening ceremony defected yesterday, saying: "I want to escape the hell of Iraq.

Saddam and his sons have turned Iraq into a concentration camp." Saeed Ahmed, 29, from the southern city of Basra, is seeking asylum in the United States. If UN battalions are asked to give military information about Hizbollah movements to the committee - information to be made available to Israeli delegates - then UN troops' neutrality will be challenged. Equally, UN information on Israeli military positions will have to be made available to the Syrians and Lebanese - and Israel is unlikely to believe that this will not then find its way to the Hizbollah.All in all, a bleak prospect for southern Lebanon.. "If the Hizbollah kill two Israeli soldiers and then go home to their village, the Israelis are going to want to shell the village. So what are the Hizbollah expected to do? Stand in a field and wait to be hit by a helicopter gunship? And if the Israelis bomb a Hizbollah position, does this mean the pilot can't fly home to Haifa, that he has to land in a field in southern Lebanon? It's ridiculous."The UN will make no official comment on the work of the ceasefire committee but they are known to be concerned at the possibility of too close a cooperation with the five powers Nor is it difficult to see why.

Israelis and Arabs on the committee thus wish to work in precisely opposite directions."Just look at the detail," one Lebanese officer commented wearily. Both sides also undertook not to launch military attacks from civilian areas or from industrial or electrical installations.Unfortunately, whereas the Israelis want the agreement to disarm the Hizbollah - which would make their occupation of southern Lebanon less bloody - the Syrians (and the Hizbollah themselves) see the committee as legitimising the Hizbollah "resistance" movement. Under the terms of the April truce - in effect a "rules of war" agreement rather than a ceasefire - Israeli troops and Hizbollah guerrillas may continue to kill each other inside Lebanon provided they do not shoot into civilian locations, and provided that Hizbollah does not fire Katyusha rockets over the border into Israel. General Hikmat Chehabi, the Syrian army chief of staff, has meanwhile said Syria will accept nothing less than "land for peace", and that the "war option" remains open to Syria if the "peace process" fails.As the Lebanese know all too well, the conflict between Israel and the Syrians is fought out in south Lebanon where the Hizbollah, funded by Iran but encouraged by Syria, continue to assault Israel's occupation troops.