Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned to death in 2004 with radioactive polonium, his widow Suha said on Wednesday, after receiving the results of Swiss forensic tests on her husband's exhumed remains.
"We are revealing a real crime, a political assassination," she told Reuters in Paris.
A team of experts, including from Lausanne University Hospital's Institute of Radiation Physics, opened Arafat's grave in Ramallah last November, and took samples from his body to seek evidence of alleged poisoning.
"This has confirmed all our doubts," Suha Arafat said after the Swiss forensic team handed over its report to her lawyers and Palestinian officials in Geneva on Tuesday. "It is scientifically proved that he didn't die a natural death and we have scientific proof that this man was killed."
The Swiss scientists' report, posted in full on the Al-Jazeera website, was more cautious. It concluded: "Taking into account the analytical limitations aforementioned, mostly time lapse since 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."
Al-Jazeera said the levels of polonium found in Arafat's ribs and pelvis, and in the soil around them, were at least 18 times higher than normal.
Suha Arafat did not name any specific country or person, and acknowledged that Arafat had many enemies, although she noted that Israel had branded him an obstacle to peace.
She told Reuters the polonium must have been administered by someone "in his close circle" because experts had told her the poison would have been put in his coffee, tea or water.
"I'm so angry at what happened and I feel that I'm mourning him all over again. This was an act by cowards," she said.
Arafat signed the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords with Israel and led a subsequent violent uprising after the failure of talks in 2000 on a comprehensive agreement. After he died in 2004, many Palestinians pointed the finger at Israel, which had besieged him in his Ramallah headquarters for the final two and a half years of his life.
"President Arafat passed away as a victim of an organized terrorist assassination perpetrated by a state, that is Israel, which was looking to get rid of him," PLO's executive committee member Wasel Abu Yousef said in a statement on Wednesday.
"The publishing of the results by the Swiss institute confirms his poisoning by polonium and this means that Israel carried it out."
Israel has denied any role in his death, noting that Arafat was 75 years old and led an unhealthy lifestyle.
"This is more soap opera than science ... a highly superficial attempt to determine a cause of death," Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said.
"This investigation has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. It is yet another chapter in the battle between Suha and the Palestinian Authority leadership, with each side ordering their own investigation. The Russian team declared a few days ago that no evidence [of polonium poisoning] was found, then did an about-face and stated the opposite," Palmor said.
"One such hole in the theory is the absence of radiation at the site, which the team did not bother to verify, or the complete disregard of the French doctors who treated Arafat and the findings in their medical records. It is impossible to determine anything without this vital information, going to show this is an obvious media stunt. The conclusions presented are weak at best. Even Suha and Palestinian Authority officials are hesitant to blame Israel."
The head of the Russian forensics institute, Vladimir Uiba, was quoted by the Interfax news agency last month as saying no trace of polonium had been found on samples from Arafat's remains examined in Moscow, but his Federal Medico-Biological Agency later denied he had made any official comment on its findings.
The investigation began after the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television news channel reported last year that traces of polonium-210 had been found on personal effects of Arafat's given to his widow by the French military hospital where he died.
At Suha Arafat's request, French prosecutors opened an investigation for suspected murder in August 2012. After the Palestinian Authority agreed to open Arafat's mausoleum, forensic experts from Switzerland, Russia and France all took samples from his remains for testing.
The French pathologists have not reported their conclusions publicly or shared any findings with Suha Arafat's legal team. A spokeswoman for the French prosecutor's office said the investigating magistrates had received no expert reports so far.
One of Suha Arafat's lawyers said the Swiss institute's report would be translated from English into French and would be handed over to the three magistrates investigating the case.
Professor David Barclay, a British forensic scientist retained by Al-Jazeera to interpret the results of the Swiss tests, said the findings from Arafat's body confirmed last year's results from the traces of bodily fluids on his underwear, toothbrush and clothing.
"In my opinion, it is absolutely certain that the cause of his illness was polonium poisoning," Barclay told Reuters. "The levels present in him are sufficient to have caused death. What we have got is the smoking gun -- the thing that caused his illness and was given to him with malice."
The same radioactive substance was slipped into a cup of tea in a London hotel to kill defecting Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. From his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his murder.
Barclay said the type of polonium discovered in Arafat's body must have been manufactured in a nuclear reactor.
While many countries could have been the source, someone in Arafat's immediate entourage must have slipped a miniscule dose of the deadly isotope probably as a powder into his drink, food, eye drops or toothpaste, he said.
Arafat fell ill in October 2004, displaying symptoms of acute gastroenteritis with diarrhea and vomiting. At first Palestinian officials said he was suffering from influenza.
He was flown to Paris in a French government plane but fell into a coma shortly after his arrival at the Percy military hospital in the suburb of Clamart, where he died on Nov. 11.
The official cause of death was a massive stroke but French doctors said at the time they were unable to determine the origin of his illness. No autopsy was carried out.
Barclay said no one would have thought to look for polonium as a possible poison until the Litvinenko case, which occurred two years after Arafat's death.
Some experts have questioned whether Arafat could have died of polonium poisoning, pointing to a brief recovery during his illness that they said was not consistent with radioactive exposure. They also noted that he did not lose all his hair. But Barclay said neither fact was inconsistent with the findings.
Since polonium loses 50 percent of its radioactivity every four months, the traces in Arafat's corpse would have faded so far as to have become untraceable if the tests had been conducted a couple of years later, the scientist said.
"A tiny amount of polonium the size of a flake of dandruff would be enough to kill 50 people if it was dissolved in water and they drank it," Barclay said.
The Al-Jazeera investigation was spearheaded by investigative journalist Clayton Swisher, a former U.S. State Department Diplomatic Protection agent who became friendly with Arafat and was suspicious of the manner of his death.
Suha Arafat called for an investigation inside the Muqataa Palestinian government headquarters and said she and her daughter, Zahwa, would pursue the case through the courts in France and elsewhere until the perpetrators were brought to justice.
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