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| Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a 2003 file photo. Arafat's widow Suha said Wednesday that her husband was poisoned with polonium. (AP Photo/ Laurent Rebours, File) |
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Tel Aviv.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat did not die a natural death but was poisoned
with polonium, his widow Suha said in an interview Wednesday.
She made
the claim to broadcaster al-Jazeera, after a laboratory in Switzerland said it
found abnormal levels of the rare, highly radioactive element on Arafat’s
personal belongings.
Suha had
requested the tests and handed the belongings, including underwear and his
toothbrush, to the Qatari channel, which sent them to the institute in
Lausanne.
She called
on the Palestinian Authority to exhume his body for further testing on his bones,
and for an international investigation similar to the one into the death of
former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
“We have
first proof of a crime here,” she told al-Jazeera.
Asked why
she had not ordered an autopsy after Arafat’s death, she replied “it never
occurred to me” and thought that “maybe it [was] not important.” Arafat died in
a military hospital outside Paris on Nov.11, 2004, after a bowel infection that
triggered a bleeding disorder and subsequent stroke.
Before
being flown to Paris for treatment, he had been under Israeli siege in his
headquarters in Ramallah.
The New
York Times, which had obtained Arafat’s French medical records, reported in
2005 that no traces of toxins were found in specimens of Arafat’s blood sent to
three different laboratories.
Arafat also
did not have an enlarged kidney, nor did he suffer liver damage, the paper
quoted the records as saying.
A senior
Israeli physician who also read the medical records said at the time that
Arafat’s illness seemed “a classic case of food poisoning that is taught at
medical school.”
Rumors that
he was assassinated by Israel have prevailed among Palestinians over the past
eight years.
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