Was Yasser Arafat poisoned with Polonium?
Baku, July 4 (AZERTAC). The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat may have been assassinated with a lethal dose of the radioactive substance polonium, scientists have claimed. Arafat died in 2004 from a mystery illness, amid theories that he was killed at the hands of Israeli spy agency Mossad. But a new investigation is set to reveal that a urine stain on Arafat`s underwear had traces of Polonium-210, the highly radioactive substance which killed Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko six years ago. The 75-year-old`s widow, Suha Arafat, has called for her late husband`s body to be exhumed after the Al Jazeera investigation found the polonium traces on clothes he wore in his final days. Previous theories had speculated that Arafat, who died in a Paris hospital in November 2004, had contracted cancer, cirrhosis, or even HIV. But tests carried out by the Institute de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, showed that Arafat`s underwear registered a level of 180 millibecquerels of Polonium-210, more than 20 times the dose to kill an average human being. Dr Francois Bochod, the director of the institute, confirmed to Al Jazeera that there had been an `unexplained, elevated amount` of polonium found on the former leader. Al Jazeera had sent Arafat`s clothes to the institute to test them, after obtaining them from his widow as part of a nine-month investigation into his death. Bochud said the only way to confirm the findings would be to exhume Arafat`s body to test it for polonium-210. ut we have to do it quite fast because polonium is decaying, so if we wait too long, for sure, any possible proof will disappear,` he told Al Jazeera. Polonium was found to have caused the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and he was assumed to have been deliberately poisoned. Arafat`s widow Suha said she would ask for Arafat`s body - buried in the West Bank town of Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian self-rule authority - to be exhumed. Speaking at the end of the documentary, aired on Al Jazeera`s English and Arabic channels, she said: `We have to go further and exhume Yasser Arafat`s body to reveal the truth to all the Muslim and Arab world.` Arafat led the Palestinian Liberation Organisation`s fight against Israel from the 1960s but signed a peace agreement with the Jewish state in 1993 establishing Palestinian self-rule areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His mysterious death came four years into a Palestinian uprising, after years of talks with Israel failed to lead to a Palestinian state. French doctors who treated Arafat in his final days could not establish the cause of death. French officials refused to give details of his condition, citing privacy laws, fuelling a host of rumors and theories over the nature of his illness.
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