TerrorismCase closed: French judges end Yasser Arafat murder-by-radioactive-poisoning inquiry
French judges who were investigating charges by the Palestinian Authority and the widow of Yasser Arafat that he was murdered by being poisoned with radioactive material, have closed the case without bringing any charges. Arafat died in November 2004, aged 75, in Percy military hospital near Paris after developing stomach pains and exhibiting symptoms of a more general deterioration while living under Israeli siege at his partially destroyed headquarters in Ramallah. In 2012 a team of Swiss scientists found elevated levels of polonium-210 and lead-210 in tissue samples taken from his exhumed body, but French and Russian scientists who examined the same tissue samples did not find abnormal radiation levels and dismissed the Swiss findings as resulting from methodological errors.
French judges who were investigating charges by the Palestinian Authority and the widow of Yasser Arafat that he was murdered by being poisoned with radioactive material, have closed the case without bringing any charges.
“At the end of the investigation … it has not been demonstrated that Mr. Yasser Arafat was murdered by polonium-210 poisoning,” according to a statement from the prosecutor from the court in Nanterre, near Paris.
Al Jazeera reports that Arafat died in November 2004, aged 75, in Percy military hospital near Paris after developing stomach pains and exhibiting symptoms of a more general deterioration while living under Israeli siege at his partially destroyed headquarters in Ramallah.
His widow, Suha, charged he was poisoned (see more in “French experts rule out foul play in 2004 death of Yasser Arafat,” HSNW, 17 March 2015). In 2012, Swiss scientists in a lab in the city of Lausanne examined some of his personal effects, including a hair brush, a tooth brush, and pieces of clothing, and also sixty tissue samples taken from his exhumed body, and found levels of radioactive polonium-210 isotope at least eighteen times higher than normal.
The tissue samples and personal effects were also examined by a team of French scientists and, at the insistence of the Palestinian Authority, by a team of Russian scientists.
The French and Russian teams found no abnormal radiation levels and dismissed the Swiss team’s findings.
The investigating judges in France, relying on the findings of the French scientists’ investigation, said on Wednesday that there was “not sufficient evidence of an intervention by a third party who could have attempted to take his life.”
Al Jazeera notes that the French judges concluded their investigations in April and conveyed their findings to the Nanterre prosecutor, who recommended in July that the case be dropped.
The Swiss scientists, while saying they had found “abnormal levels of polonium” in Arafat’s body tissues and personal belongings, stopped short of saying that he had been poisoned by the substance.
Toxicologists say that the isotopes polonium-210 and lead-210, found in Arafat’s grave and in the samples, were of “an environmental nature,” the Nanterre prosecutor, Catherine Denis, said in April.
Tawfiq Tirawi, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s inquiry committee into Arafat’ death, refused to accept the judges’ conclusions, or the earlier findings by the French and Russian scientists. “We’ll continue our investigation to reach the killer of Arafat until we know how Arafat was killed,” he told AFP.
Lawyers representing Arafat’s widow accused the judges of a rush to judgement, and called for more experts to be asked to look into the matter.
