Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned to death with radioactive polonium: widow
The Swiss scientists found a lethal level of polonium-210 in Arafat's body, Al Jazeera television news channel said.
Arafat died in France on November 11 2004 at the age of 75, but doctors were unable to specify the cause of death. PHOTO: AFP/FILE
PARIS:
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 corpse.
"We are revealing a real crime, a political assassination," she told Reuters in Paris, after receiving a report from the Lausanne University Hospital's Institute of Radiation Physics on samples taken from Arafat's grave in the West Bank city of Ramallah, when the mausoleum was opened last November.
The Swiss scientists found a lethal level of polonium-210 in his body, Al Jazeera television news channel said. That confirmed the findings of an investigation by the Qatar-based channel last year that detected traces of the isotope on Arafat's personal effects.
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 corpse.
"We are revealing a real crime, a political assassination," she told Reuters in Paris, after receiving a report from the Lausanne University Hospital's Institute of Radiation Physics on samples taken from Arafat's grave in the West Bank city of Ramallah, when the mausoleum was opened last November.
The Swiss scientists found a lethal level of polonium-210 in his body, Al Jazeera television news channel said. That confirmed the findings of an investigation by the Qatar-based channel last year that detected traces of the isotope on Arafat's personal effects.