RAMALLAH: Swiss scientists have completed that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat possibly died from polonium poisoning, according to a text of their findings published on Wednesday by Al-Jazeera television.
The results of tests on Arafat’s remains “reasonably support the intention that the death was the significance of poisoning with polonium-210,” said the 108-page analysis posted on the Qatar-based satellite broadcaster’s website.
November 11, 2004 Arafat died in France at the age of 75, but doctors were unable to identify the cause of death. No autopsy was agreed out at the time, in line with his widow’s request.
His remains were exhumed in November 2012 and samples taken, partly to explore whether he had been poisoned — a suspicion that grew after the elimination of Russian ex-spy and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
“New toxicological and radio-toxicological investigations were performed, delegate suddenly high levels of polonium-210 and lead-210 activity in many of the analyzed specimens,” said the November 5 report penned by 10 Swiss experts.
It added that polonium levels in “bones and soft tissues were up to 20 times larger than references in the literature”, absolutely ruling out the possibility previously reported in some media that cigarette smoke had caused greater than normal polonium levels among Arafat’s personal effects.
Arafat’s widow Shula said in an interview with Al-Jazeera that the poisoning amounted to “the assassination of a great leader” and a “political crime”.
she said “I don’t know who did it, but it’s terrible,”
“It’s so sad, but it’s a shock. It’s a shock for myself, it’s a shock for my daughter… an elected president to be killed in this very cowardly way. People could not kill him on the battlefield.”
Suha met Arafat in the mid-1980s when she was a student at the Sorbonne University in Paris, but was often accused of leading a lavish lifestyle far removed from the reality of most of the Palestinians that her husband fought for.
She later became his economic adviser before they married secretly in 1990, only revealing their union two years later.
Israel’s foreign ministry on Wednesday scoffed at the notion that Arafat had been poisoned, suggestive of that the analysis was not independent.
“This is a soap opera — where Suha fights Arafat’s successor episode one hundred and something,” foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP.
“The two (examining) teams have been specially made by interested parties, they are not independent teams.
“At any rate, it is no anxiety of Israel because we have nothing to do with it,” Palmor said.
The Palestinian official in charge of the exploration into Arafat’s death, Tawfiq Tirawi, said on Tuesday that he had received the findings of the Swiss laboratory, although he declined to relates them.
Official Palestinian news agency WAFA said that a separate Russian team appointed by the Palestinian Authority also handed on November 2 its report.
Some 60 samples were taken from the remains of the late Palestinian leader last yearin November for the explore into whether he had been sour by polonium.
The samples were divided between the Swiss and Russian investigators and a French team carrying out an investigation at Suha Arafat’s request.
In an October report published by The Lancet medical journal, eight scientists working at the Institute of emission Physics and University Centre of Legal Medicine in Lausanne confirmed they found traces of polonium in separate tests on clothing used by Arafat, which they said “support the risk” he was poisoned. (AFP)
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