TerroristsNo proof Yasser Arafat was killed by radioactive poisoning: scientists

Published 16 October 2013

Yasser Arafat died in November 2004 in a French hospital after rapid deterioration in his condition. He was 75 years old, but in good condition, and Palestinian and French doctors could not identify the reason for his decline. Even before he died, Palestinian leaders spread the rumor that he was poisoned on the orders of then-Prime Minister Arik Sharon of Israel. Last year, the Palestinian Authority agreed to a request by Arafat’s widow, Suha, and French judicial investigators to exhume his body for further tests. Tissues were harvested and were examined, along with some of Arafat’s personal effects, by Swiss, French, and Russian scientific teams. The Swiss team published its report this weekend in the leading medical journal The Lancet, saying that traces of the radioactive polonium-210 were found on some of Arafat’s personal effects, but not in his body tissues. The Swiss team uses suggestive language – the evidence they found “support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning with polonium-210” and that his symptoms in the weeks before he died “might suggest radioactive poisoning” – but admit that the absence of evidence of polonium-210 in body tissues makes it impossible to say with certainty that Arafat was poisoned. The Russian scientists are more definitive. “He could not have died of polonium poisoning — the Russian experts found no traces of this substance,” Vladimir Uiba, the head of Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency, said earlier today (Tuesday).

Tasir Arafat displays deteriorating healt shortly before death // Source: wikipedia.org

A team of Swiss scientists from the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV) at the Université de Lausanne, who have examined the exhumed remains of Yasser Arafat, confirmed that they have found traces of the radioactive substance polonium-210 on some of his personal effects. Some Palestinians accused Israel of poisoning Arafat in 2004.

The Guardian reports that the discovery of polonium-210 on Arafat’s effects was first made public last year, fuelling calls for a more thorough investigation of his death in a French hospital in November 2004. Last November his body was exhumed from its resting place in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and tissues were harvested for examination at CHUV.

The Swiss toxicologists who examined the body published their report this past weekend in the Lancet.

They say they had examined thirty-eight items belonging to Arafat, including underwear and a toothbrush, and compared them with a control group of thirty-seven items of Arafat’s which had been in storage for some time before his death.

They found traces of the substance which “support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning with polonium-210,” the scientists reported, adding: “Although the absence of myelosuppression [bone marrow deficiency] and hair loss does not favor acute radiation syndrome, symptoms of nausea, vomiting, fatigue, diarrhoea, and anorexia, followed by hepatic and renal failures, might suggest radioactive poisoning.”

Arafat was 75 when he fell ill in late summer 2004 while holed up in the half-destroyed Mukata, his presidential compound, in Ramallah. The Mukata was under Israeli military siege following Israel’s 2002 military attack on Palestinian leadership targets in the wake of a series of Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel.

Palestinian doctors could not identify the source of Arafat’s deteriorating medical condition, and he was flown to France for further treatment. French physicians, mystified by his illness, could not arrest his decline, and he died a couple of weeks after being admitted to the French hospital.

Even before he died, Palestinians leaders spread the rumor that he was poisoned on the orders of then-Prime Minister Arik Sharon of Israel. Some in Arafat’s entourage, aware of their leader’s fondness for sweets, claimed Israel’s Mossad killed him by lacing the cookies – he favored pecan sandies – which he consumed in large quantities with poison.

No postmortem was conducted on his body.

Last year, after al-Jazeera aired a documentary in which Swiss scientists said that some of Arafat’s personal effects were found to have traces of polonium-210 on them, the Palestinian Authority agreed to a request by Arafat’s widow, Suha, and French judicial investigators to exhume his body for further tests.

In the Lancet report, the Swiss scientists said that “An autopsy would have been useful in this case because although potential polonium poisoning might not have been identified during that procedure, body samples could have been kept and tested afterwards.”

The Swiss scientists’ suggestion that Arafat may have died of radioactive poisoning has been rejected by other scientists. Arafat’s tissues and personal effects were also examined by Russian and French scientists. We are still waiting for the conclusions of the French team, but The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that a member of the Russian team, responding to the Lancet report, said today (Tuesday) that the Swiss scientists’ suggestive language notwithstanding – the Swiss team said the evidence they found “support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning with polonium-210” and that his symptoms in the weeks before he died might suggest radioactive poisoning” — that forensic tests the team conducted found no indications of polonium poisoning in the body of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

He could not have died of polonium poisoning — the Russian experts found no traces of this substance,” Vladimir Uiba, the head of Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday.

Polonium-210 was used by agents of the FSB, Russia’s security service, to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian KGB agent. Litvinenko had left Russia for London, where he became a leading critic of Vladimir Putin, a former fellow KGB officer. The FSB agent met Litvinenko at a London restaurant, and slipped a small amount of polonium-210 into Litvinenko’s food while Litvinenko was in the rest room.

— Read more in Pascal Froidevaux et al., “Improving forensic investigation for polonium poisoning,” The Lancet 382, no. 9900 (12 October 2013): 1308 (doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(13)61834-6)