Palestinians pay their respects at the grave of the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, yesterday.
LAUSANNE: The remains of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat showed test results consistent with polonium poisoning and should lead to a judicial investigation even if they were not absolute proof that he died that way, Swiss experts said yesterday.
The two forensic experts were part of an international team that opened Arafat’s grave in the West Bank city of Ramallah last November and took samples from his body to see if there was evidence he was poisoned with the radioactive element. Their report was released on Wednesday.
“Our observations are coherent with a hypothesis of poisoning, in any case more consistent than with the opposite hypothesis (of no poisoning),” Patrice Mangin, director of Lausanne University Hospital’s centre of legal medicine, told a news conference.
Doubts remained, although they had exhausted all forensic investigations into existing specimens, he said. Biological samples taken from Arafat’s body at the time of his death in in France in November 2004 have been destroyed.
“The doubt is enough to induce more investigation, but at a judicial level, to open an inqiury to look at other kinds of evidence, not measurements, but contacts between Palestinians and other people,” Mangin said.
“From my point of view, the evidence is more in the country where President Arafat was living,” he added.
Francois Bochud, director of the university’s Institute of Radiation Physics, said the evidence was not conclusive.
“Can we say with certitude that polonium was the cause of death of President Arafat? Unfortunately for those of you who want a clearly-defined answer, the answer is no. That is to say, our study did not permit us to demonstrate categorically the hypothesis of poisoning by polonium.”
Bochud said: “We cannot tell how much polonium actually was ingested, only that our observations are compatible with the poisoning hypothesis.”
Arafat died in a French hospital in November 2004, four weeks after falling ill after a meal with vomiting and stomach pains.
The official cause of death was a stroke but French doctors said at the time they were unable to determine the origin of his illness. No autopsy was carried out.
His widow Suha initiated Swiss testing on his personal effects in 2012 to probe whether he had been poisoned and the results lead to analyses on samples taken from his corpse, including bones, hair and his shroud.
Bochud said a few micrograms of polonium would be enough to kill somebody.
“What we know about the time lag between ingestion of radioactive poisoning and death is that usually it lasts around one month. This is commonly observed in radiation poisoning and this is actually also the case that we observed with Mr. Arafat,” Bochud said.
REUTERS
