Four senior Israeli doctors suspected of illegally experimenting on humans were arrested on Monday, local daily Ha'aretz reported.

According to the report, the arrested doctors are from Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot and Hartzfeld Geriatric Hospital in Gedera.

Israel's national fraud squad has launched an investigation into the affair and a court will decide whether to remand the four on Monday evening, said Ha'aretz.

The State Comptroller's Office slammed the hospitals over their illegal experiments in a report in May 2005, the daily said.

According to the report, the hospitals in Gedera and Rehovot conducted illegal and unethical testing on thousands of elderly patients for years.

During one of the incidents described, twelve patients died either during or shortly after the experiments, but these incidents were not reported to the Health Ministry or investigated, as is required by law.

The Israeli Health Ministry's director general filed a complaint with police following an internal inquiry into the affair and the fraud squad confiscated from the hospitals many documents pertaining to the experiments.

The ministry's investigation revealed that some of the patients were included in the experiments without providing their consent, while some of them suffered from severe mental damage, which prevented them from being legally capable of providing consent. According to the State Comptroller's report, some of the tests did not even yield any medically or scientifically beneficial results. Furthermore, some of the experiments were conducted despite top doctors' warnings that they were illegal or unethical. Source: Xinhua