Finance Minister Shimon Peres denied Thursday that he had a secret meeting with an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization when he was in Stockholm briefly this week.
Peres, who is chairman of the Labor Party, was to have led his party’s delegation at the Socialist International Congress in the Swedish capital.
Although Peres was there, the Israelis boycotted the congress because the PLO had been invited as observers.
The mass-circulation Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter reported Thursday that Peres met with the head of the PLO delegation, Yasir Abed Rabbo, at a private dinner given by the Swedish foreign minister, Sven Anderson.
Rabbo did not comment on the story, but he told a news conference on Thursday that the United Nations-supervised elections planned in November for Namibia, formerly Southwest Africa, could be a model for the elections Israel wants to hold in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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