Photograph by Remy Steinegger
Traces of the radioactive substance polonium-210 have been found on some personal belongings of former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, fuelling claims he was poisoned in 2004.
The original discovery of the substance on Arafat’s personal effects was made last year in an investigation by Al-Jazeera, and led to his body being exhumed for further investigations.
Now the same team of scientists from the Institute for Radiation Physics in Lausanne, Switzerland, that made those first investigations have published an essay in the Lancet which supports their original claims. The essays states that they found traces of polonium-210 that “”support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning”.
The scientists go on to say that although Arafat did not suffer from myelosuppression or hair loss, two common symptoms of radiation poisoning, everyone responds differently and the nausea and fatigue he did suffer are also common symptoms.
Arafat died in November aged 75 after becoming ill during an Israeli military seige of his presidential compound in Ramallah, but his cause of death could not be conclusively identified at the time, fuelling speculation that he had been poisoned by Israel.
Polonium-210 was used to poison and kill Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian KGB agent, in 2006 in London, with Russian KGB agents the alleged perpetrators.