The strange death of Yasser Arafat

(MENAFN- Jordan Times) Few took at face value the claims that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died of natural causes, and the questions about his mysterious 2004 illness and death were suddenly reopened by Al Jazeera satellite channel. After all, Arafat was in good health for his age. His sudden illness remained completely unexplained and teams of doctors from all over the world were unable to solve the mystery of what caused his symptoms and eventual death in the military hospital just outside Paris, to which he was airlifted from Ramallah. Yet, after his death there was no international clamor for an investigation, such as the one done in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Al Jazeera's 9-month investigation revealed traces of polonium-210, a radioactive element, on the clothes Arafat wore during his illness. The personal items were provided by Arafat's widow, Suha, and sent for examination to the University of Lausanne's Institute of Radiation Physics in Switzerland. According to scientists, the traces of polonium were higher than would be expected to occur naturally, and of a type that suggested the substance had been made in a nuclear reactor. This raises the strong possibility that Arafat was poisoned. Because polonium poisoning is so rare, it is not routinely tested for and the French doctors did not look for it when Arafat was in their care. Indeed, it was not widely known until two years after Arafat's death. In 2006, the same poison was used to assassinate Russian Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent turned dissident, in London in 2006. It was determined that Litvinenko became ill after drinking tea contaminated with polonium. Polonium, experts say, is ideal for assassinations because it is lethal only to a person who ingests it, is difficult to trace, its effects are apparently irreversible, and it takes some time to act, allowing the killer to make a getaway. At this point, the only way to find out for sure if Arafat was murdered with polonium is to test his remains. If Al Jazeera investigation broke some ground by providing evidence of poison in Arafat's clothing and toothbrush, the distance between this elementary finding and any substantial, conclusive result remains long and difficult. Many questions still need to be addressed: Why did the Paris hospital keep the medical records of the case secret? And why did it only enable the New York Times to obtain them in 2005, as we were informed by an article by Isabel Kershner on July 5? Why were the laboratory samples of the deceased destroyed in 2008, as Al Jazeera revealed? French law requires that the samples be kept for 10 years, but only if there is a judicial investigation. There was none in Arafat's case, but then why keep the samples for four years and then suddenly destroyed them? The other intriguing issue is related to the examination of Arafat's body. It is not clear what the final verdict of the Palestinian Authority on this matter is going to be after some confused hints from authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in response to Suha Arafat's request that the body be exhumed for further testing. If an examination of Arafat's remains finds levels of polonium consistent with poisoning, the investigation will commence its harder stage of tracking down the culprits. One must also wonder why the Palestinian Authority remained silent for so many years about a case that looked highly dubious right from the beginning. Why were there no firm demands that the nature of the illness as well as the cause of death be disclosed in order to remove doubts, and why was there no meaningful, independent and credible Palestinian investigation of the death of such an important leader who spent his last months under humiliating Israeli siege in his destroyed headquarters? Arafat's nephew, Nasser Al Qidwa, a senior Palestinian Authority official, was one of very few people close to him in the Paris hospital before his death. A few years after his uncle's death, I met Qidwa and asked him if the assassination theories circulating at the time had good grounds and what he personally thought of them, being so close to the events. Qidwa did not exclude the possibility of assassination but had no clue as to where one should point a finger. He told me: "We requested the French hospital doctors not to issue any incorrect information about the illness or the death. We asked them that if they did not want for any reason to announce the truth as it is, they should keep quiet and not say something untrue and misleading." He also told me that the hospital authorities said Arafat's illness could be the result of one of three causes. One could be cancer and there was no evidence that Arafat had cancer; the other could be HIV and clearly Arafat did not have that disease, as the medical records obtained by Al Jazeera conclusively show; the third could be poisoning. Eliminating the first two causes only leaves poisoning as a possibility, and an investigation should have been pursued. If stronger evidence of poisoning emerges, we cannot avoid naming Israel as a possible suspect. Not only does Israel have a long record of assassinating Palestinian leaders, it has also used poison on at least two known occasions: the 1997 attempted murder of Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal in Amman, and the 2010 murder of Hamas official Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. Polonium can only be manufactured in a nuclear reactor, which limits any potential suspects to nuclear-capable states. Moreover, in April 2004, just months before Arafat's death, then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon issued public threats of unspecified action against Arafat, adding that he "regretted" not killing the Palestinian leader during the 1982-3 Israeli siege of Beirut. It is no secret that at the time of Arafat's death, Israel and its American and European backers considered Arafat to be a major obstacle to the smooth implementation of the so-called "peace process" on Israeli terms. Israel, then, clearly had a motive and a record of such murders. At this point one can only theorise about Israel's role, if any, or whether Israel might have had any help. But the questions will not go away until everything possible is done to learn the truth.