Egypt asks Israel to probe alleged 1967 killings

CAIRO, Mar 6 (Reuters) Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has asked Israel to launch an inquiry into charges that Israeli troops may have killed Egyptian prisoners of war in 1967, the official Middle East News Agency said today.

Egyptians were outraged by an Israeli documentary film which, according to Israeli media reports widely quoted in Egypt, alleged an army unit led by Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, now Israel's infrastructure minister, may have killed 250 prisoners of war in Sinai rather than transferring them to POW camps.

Ben-Eliezer has denied the allegations, saying those killed were Palestinian guerrillas fighting in the Egyptian army and that they died in battle.

Aboul Gheit said he has asked Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to launch an investigation into the issue and report the findings to Egypt, MENA reported from Brussels, where the two ministers were holding talks with European Union officials.

''Egypt will see Israel's position in the next few days and, in light of that position, it will deal with the situation on the regional, international and legal levels if Israel does not move,'' the agency quoted him as saying.

The maker of the Israeli documentary that gave rise to the controversy has denied his film had asserted that captured Egyptian soldiers had been shot.

The Egyptian news agency quoted Livni as saying she had not seen the film but that, according to her information, Egyptian soldiers in 1967 had died in battle not in captivity.

Israel occupied Sinai in the 1967 Middle East war and handed it back to Egypt after the 1979 peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state.

REUTERS MS SSC1633