Was Yasser Arafat Poisoned with Polonium?

News reports are surfacing that Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned with Polonium-210, the same type of poison that was used to do away with Alexander Litvinenko. Arafats widow is now calling for his body to be exhumed and for tests to be undertaken on his body.

An interesting read, which raises many questions, most importantly, whodunnit? why? and how?

I could list a whole heap of groups /countries/individuals that would have liked to see Yasser go sooner rather than later. I just dont think it would have been israel..or the russians. If the initial tests prove to be true, my money would be on an inside job, with Hamas or Hamas supporters behind the operation.

Will this cause further controvery for Hamas? Will this turn the tide of Palestinian public opinion against Hamas? or is this story concocted by the Israelis hoping to ride on the back of the Arab Spring , while hoping to overthrow Hamas? If its true, who do you think done it?

Interested time ahead waiting for the results

http://arabia.msn.com/news/world/jg/2012/july/16898915/swiss-institute-finds-polonium-arafat-effects.aspx?region=all&featuredAll1

Swiss institute finds polonium in Arafat s effects


Released on - Thursday,05 July , 2012 -06:37

ZURICH: Traces of the poisonous element polonium have been found in the belongings of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, a Swiss institute said on Wednesday, and a television report said his widow had demanded his body be exhumed for further tests.Arafat died at a hospital in France in 2004, after a sudden illness which baffled doctors. Many Palestinians have long suspected he was poisoned.Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters on Tuesday it had found 'surprisingly' high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat s belongings.But he stressed that clinical symptoms described in Arafat s medical reports were not consistent with polonium-210 and that conclusions could not be drawn as to whether the Palestinian leader was poisoned or not.The Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite channel said the institute had tested Arafat s personal effects, given them by his widow. Its documentary said they showed that his clothes, toothbrush and kaffiyeh headscarf contained abnormal levels of polonium, a rare, highly radioactive element.'I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr. Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids,' Francois Bochud, director of the institute, said in the documentary.Bochud said the only way to confirm the findings would be to exhume Arafat s body to test it for polonium-210. 'But 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 rumours and theories over the nature of his illness

 

sure, i can understand your line of thought, but by the same standard that same theory seems to only apply exclusively to african and arab leaders. The same could be said of several US Presidents, Foreign and Defence ministers.

if the tests are conclusive, and they to point to an assassination, do you think it would change the political climate within the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the middle east?

 

Is is possible? Of course, people do stupid things over there with little forethought of the possible effects.

Honestly though, he's had effectively no power for half a decade at this point. Hamas controls the government, and PLO has found more support from Israel than their own people at this point. There's no reason to kill him other than some old vendetta at best. The truth is it'd almost be better revenge to let him continue to wallow without power, someone with a personality like that it's the worst form of torture.

 

I'm surprised this test hasn't been done already. Like a day or two after he died...

I would put it at 20% that someone got to him. But, I don't know if it would be good for the public to know or not at this point. Each side will blame the other and you won't really know who did it.

 

Polonium is some pretty esoteric stuff. Not the sort of thing a third world anything would use or obtain.

 

But money can buy you anything. Especially if you want to make it appear that someone else did it.

 

Arafat was willing to compromise towards a solution.

Rabin was assassinated for demonstrating the same willingness.

An assassinated Arafat is not out of the question.

It's pretty evident that a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict is neither a goal nor a desire for the powers that be and never really has been.

What confuses me is the timing. Arafat had little to no influence and had been politically marginalized by the time he died.

 

"Surprisingly high levels" is a relative term. The half-life of Polonium-210 is ~138 days. After 7 years, the detectable amount today would be 1/364,700 of the amount present at the time of his death. I'll wait for the official report, but based on that alone, this is setting off my "conspiracy theory" alarms. Jumping to conclusions before experts weigh in with actual measurements and the statistical likelihood of those measurements would be unwise.

 

Polonium turns into Lead 206 though. I would think that they would look for lead that shouldn't be there.

I don't know enough about how sensitive the detectors are as to how much radiation can be found, even if it is 0.00015 grams.

 

Polonium isn't the only thing that decays to lead-206, though. I have very little knowledge of the testing methodology and error margins involved, so I'll withhold judgment until we hear from qualified experts. Unfortunately, I suspect that the uncertainty that I admit to will be overlooked by the majority of interested parties and that the results will be touted by the people whose hypotheses it supports and decried as part of the conspiracy by their opponents.