As Publisher Robert Maxwell was buried in Jerusalem on Sunday, a judge in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, ordered the crew of Maxwell’s yacht not to leave the Canary Islands while investigations continued into the tycoon’s death.

Maxwell died at sea off Grand Canary island Tuesday under strange circumstances.

The death of the 68-year-old British publisher, who was plagued by debts and reports of links to the Israeli secret service, sparked fierce speculation of possible foul play or suicide.

British newspapers reported Sunday that Maxwell’s widow, Elisabeth, said she believed that an enemy might have killed him, while his doctor described his death as very strange. Another paper reported that British officials had planned to interview Maxwell in connection with an insider trading investigation.


The Maxwell family lawyer said Tenerife Judge Isabel Oliva issued an order to continue investigations into the death, which an initial autopsy attributed to natural causes.

The lawyer told the state news agency Efe that Oliva asked four crewmen to return to ratify their earlier statements. The seven other crew members have already done so.

Maxwell disappeared Tuesday from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and rescue workers found his naked body in the Atlantic.

At the time of his death, the publishing tycoon was embroiled in business and legal wrangles. A prolific plaintiff, he was locked in a libel suit over allegations that he had links to Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.


“He was a tremendous fighter. Suicide would have been totally out of character,” his widow told the Sunday Mirror, a Maxwell newspaper.

“I toyed with every possibility, that he had been pushed in by someone planted there,” she said. “There were so many people who hated him. He had many threats. Many people would be delighted to bump him off.”

The Sunday Telegraph reported that government officials had planned to question Maxwell as a witness in an insider trading investigation involving the French bank Societe Generale.

The newspaper said France’s stock exchange regulator was inquiring into share purchases by investors trying to change the core holding in Societe Generale, which went private in 1987.


It also said the ministry had begun an internal inquiry into dealing in the shares of Maxwell Communication Corp., the largest group in the Maxwell empire. Maxwell had many business interests in France and recently sold his stake in a French television station.

The Sunday Times quoted Maxwell’s doctor, Dr. Joseph Joseph, as saying Maxwell did not have a heart condition and was in good health.

Speculation persists that the family will open its own investigations into Maxwell’s death, once the Spanish authorities have released the final autopsy results. The results are expected in about a week, once lung, brain and kidney samples have been tested.

The body underwent a four-hour autopsy in Las Palmas on Wednesday. Investigating Judge Luis Gutierrez said afterward that his provisional finding was death from natural causes, possibly a heart attack, and that Maxwell died before hitting the water.


Maxwell’s widow said before leaving Las Palmas for Israel on Friday that she rejected reports that she was dissatisfied with Spanish handling of the case.

In Jerusalem, Maxwell, a Holocaust survivor, was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mt. of Olives in the kind of funeral usually reserved for statesmen. He was eulogized by Israeli President Chaim Herzog as “a mighty man . . . of almost mythological stature.”

The eulogies reflected the strong emotions aroused by the booming, iron-willed British media magnate, his drift away from Judaism and his subsequent return to the faith.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir attended the funeral, as did Housing Minister Ariel Sharon. Hundreds of dignitaries and ordinary well-wishers paid respects, including Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet Jewish dissident.


The turnout demonstrated the nation’s gratitude for Maxwell’s financial and emotional investment in Israel and his charity work for the Jewish people.

“We have to say thank you to him. He was a great man,” said 15-year-old Chaim Gedalia Samsonov. He was one of 200 young Soviet Jews brought to Israel at Maxwell’s expense for medical treatment after being exposed to radiation from the 1986 nuclear plant disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

In his last weeks, Maxwell was accused in the book “The Samson Option” of helping the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, to apprehend an Israeli who leaked his nation’s nuclear weapons secrets.

Maxwell denied the claim and sued American journalist Seymour Hersh and his publisher. They countersued.


Maxwell’s funeral was a stark, unadorned affair, typical of Jewish burial in Israel. His body lay in state on a stretcher in Binyanei Ha’ooma, the city’s convention hall, covered in a black-striped Jewish prayer shawl and flanked by two white candles.

Saluting Maxwell before his body was taken across Jerusalem for burial, Herzog said: “He scaled the heights. Kings and barons besieged his doorstep. Many admired him. Many disliked him. But nobody remained indifferent to him.”

Herzog remarked on “the consummate energy and imagination” that drove Maxwell “so far from his beginnings and yet in the end brought him so near.”

Maxwell’s son, Philip, said: “He never forgot his Jewishness and he chose to be laid to rest here. He wanted to close the circle of his life.”


Britain’s Jewish Chronicle reported Friday that as a member of Parliament, Maxwell declined to be included in the 1964 Jewish yearbook on grounds that he was married in church and did not regard himself as a Jew.