Arafat Poisoning: Israel Is 'Only Suspect'

Who Poisoned Yasser Arafat?

Updated: 6:13pm UK, Thursday 07 November 2013

He fell ill on October 12, 2004. On the 29th he was flown to a French hospital for emergency treatment. By November 11, he was dead.

The mystery of the Palestinian leader's sudden medical decline while under Israeli siege in his Ramallah headquarters has been, partly, solved by Lausanne University.

Scientists there found between 18 and 36 times the anticipated amount of the deadly radioactive Polonium-210 and ruled out accidental contamination.

Sixty samples of soil around his body, his hips and ribs, disinterred from his mausoleum in Ramallah last November were sent to the Swiss experts as well as scientists in France and Russia.

The Swiss findings, couched in scientific language, leave little room for real doubt.

They said: "Taking into account the analytical limitations, mostly time lapse since the death and the nature and quality of the specimens, the results moderately support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning with polonium-210."

The French results are not due until magistrates finish their murder investigation into Arafat's death. The Russian findings are due out any day.

Surrounded in his palace, the Muqata, Arafat may have been one of the world's first Polonium poisonings - a victim of a method usually associated with a nation state.

As Suha Arafat, his widow, said: "Answer lies in the Muqata (Palestinian government headquarters), where my late husband had spent his last three years under siege.

"And the head of the investigation committee Mr (Tawfik) Tirawi is, I'm sure, willing now to go further for investigation to know who committed this shameful crime, this assassination - political assassination - of an elected leader."

Now - whodunit? Israel will inevitably face accusations - but the killers themselves may have been close members of Yasser Arafat's own entourage - an embarrassing allegation to face for the heirs to the father of the modern Palestinian nation.

"You don't accidentally or voluntarily absorb a source of polonium - it's not something that appears in the environment like that," said Patrice Mangin, director of the Lausanne University Hospital's forensics centre.

"Our results reasonably support the poisoning theory," said Francois Bochud, director of the Institute of Radiation Physics that carried out the probe, though he was careful to emphasise the lingering questions that will require further investigation to answer.

That Mr Arafat may have been poisoned by someone close to him, by someone perhaps acting for a foreign power, is not something that either the Palestinian Authority nor Israel, nor indeed many Palestinians want to reflect upon too hard - not right now, anyway.

Israel and the PA are locked in tense and acrimonious negotiations aimed at ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

They are hung up on the thorny old issues of the Palestinian insistence on invoking the right of return of refugees and their descendants from territory captured by Israel in 1948 and 1967.

On Palestinian insistence that Israel end its illegal constructions of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

On Palestinian claims, which Israel rejects outright, on East Jerusalem as a future capital.

On Israel's insistence that it needs to keep troops in the Jordan valley and control Palestine's eastern border as part of its defences.

These are issues that Arafat and successive Israeli negotiators failed to resolve but which are now the object of intense diplomacy that the US secretary of state, John Kerry, has thrown enormous personal energy into.

A solution to the Arab-Israeli puzzle remains extremely hard to see. It would be impossible to discern if the puzzle was thrown to the floor over Arafat.

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