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| Palestinians walk past a mural depicting late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Shati Refugee Camp, in Gaza City, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2013. Swiss scientists have found evidence suggesting Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned with a radioactive substance, a TV station reported on Wednesday, prompting new allegations by his widow that the Palestinian leader was the victim of a "shocking" crime. Arabic reads, "the leader Abu Ammar, you are in our hearts, your sun will not go down." |
RAMALLAH, West
Bank (AP) -- Yasser Arafat's mysterious 2004 death turned into a
whodunit Thursday after Swiss scientists who examined his remains said
the Palestinian leader was probably poisoned with radioactive polonium.
Yet
hard proof remains elusive, and nine years on, tracking down anyone who
might have slipped minuscule amounts of the lethal substance into
Arafat's food or drink could be difficult.
A
new investigation could also prove embarrassing - and not just for
Israel, which the Palestinians have long accused of poisoning their
leader and which has denied any role.
The
Palestinians themselves could come under renewed scrutiny, since Arafat
was holed up in his Israeli-besieged West Bank compound in the months
before his death, surrounded by advisers, staff and bodyguards.
Arafat
died at a French military hospital on Nov. 11, 2004, at age 75, a month
after suddenly falling violently ill at his compound. At the time,
French doctors said he died of a stroke and had a blood-clotting
problem, but records were inconclusive about what caused that condition.
The
Swiss scientists said that they found elevated traces of polonium-210
and lead in Arafat's remains that could not have occurred naturally, and
that the timeframe of Arafat's illness and death was consistent with
poisoning from ingesting polonium.
"Our
results reasonably support the poisoning theory," Francois Bochud,
director of Switzerland's Institute of Radiation Physics, which carried
out the investigation, said at a news conference.
Bochud
and Patrice Mangin, director of the Lausanne University Hospital's
forensics center, said they tested and ruled out innocent explanations,
such as accidental poisoning.
"I think we can
eliminate this possibility because, as you can imagine, you cannot find
polonium everywhere. It's a very rare toxic substance," Mangin told The
Associated Press.
Palestinian officials,
including Arafat's successor, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, had
no comment on the substance of the report but promised a continued
investigation.
The findings are certain to
revive Palestinian allegations against Israel, a nuclear power. Polonium
can be a byproduct of the chemical processing of uranium, but usually
is made artificially in a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator.
Arafat's
widow, Suha, called on the Palestinian leadership to seek justice for
her husband, saying, "It's clear this is a crime."
Speaking
by phone from the Qatari capital Doha, she did not mention Israel but
argued that only countries with nuclear capabilities have access to
polonium.
In another interview later Thursday,
she described her husband's death as a "political assassination" and
"the crime of the century" and called the new testing conclusive for
poisoning. She said she couldn't predict who was behind the death, but
she added, "Whoever did this crime is a coward."
Israel
has repeatedly denied a role in Arafat's death and did so again
Thursday. Paul Hirschson, a Foreign Ministry official, dismissed the
claim as "hogwash."
"We couldn't be bothered
to" kill him, Hirschson said. "If anyone remembers the political reality
at the time, Arafat was completely isolated. His own people were barely
speaking to him. There's no logical reason for Israel to have wanted to
do something like this."
In his final years,
Arafat was being accused by Israel and the U.S. of condoning and even
encouraging Palestinian attacks against Israelis instead of working for a
peace deal. In late 2004, Israeli tanks no longer surrounded his
compound, but Arafat was afraid to leave for fear of not being allowed
to return.
Shortly after his death, the
Palestinians launched their own investigation, questioning dozens of
people in Arafat's compound, including staff, bodyguards and officials,
but no suspects emerged.
Security around
Arafat was easily breached toward the end of his life. Aides have
described him as impulsive, unable to resist tasting gifts of chocolate
or trying out medicines brought by visitors from abroad.
The
investigation was dormant until the satellite TV station Al-Jazeera
persuaded Arafat's widow last year to hand over a bag with her husband's
underwear, headscarves and other belongings. After finding traces of
polonium in biological stains on the clothing, investigators dug up his
grave in his Ramallah compound earlier this year to take bone and soil
samples.
Investigators noted Thursday that
they could not account for the chain of custody of the items that were
in the bag, leaving open the possibility of tampering.
However,
the latest findings are largely based on Arafat's remains and burial
soil, and in this case, tampering appears highly improbable, Bochud
said.
"I think this can really be ruled out
because it was really difficult to access the body," he said. "When we
opened the tomb, we were all together."
Polonium-210 is the same substance that killed KGB agent-turned-Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
"It's
quite difficult to understand why (Arafat) might have had any polonium,
if he was just in his headquarters in Ramallah," said Alastair Hay, a
professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds who was
not involved in the investigation.
"He wasn't somebody who was moving in and out of atomic energy plants or dealing with radioactive isotopes."
