Yasser Arafat's widow: My husband's death was a crime
Fadi Al-Assaad / Reuters
Suha Arafat, wife of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, speaking in Doha, Qatar, Thursday.
By Alastair Jamieson and Lawahez Jabari, NBC News
Yasser Arafat's widow issued a plea for justice Thursday after scientists concluded the former Palestinian leader was likely deliberately poisoned by the radioactive substance polonium-210.
Suha Arafat said her husband's death was a crime and that his successors "have to find the tools and pursue the legal case" in international courts.
Arafat died in 2004 in France, a month after falling ill at his Israeli-besieged West Bank compound.
Suha Arafat did not specifically blame Israel in her comments to The Associated Press Thursday, but said only countries with nuclear capabilities had access to polonium.
"I can't accuse anyone, but it's clear this is a crime, and only countries with nuclear reactors can have and do that," she said. "Now the ball is in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.”
A team of Swiss experts has concluded that Arafat ingested radioactive polonium, and that the time-frame of his illness and death were consistent with polonium poisoning.
A new report says that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whose remains were exhumed a year ago, may have been assassinated in 2004 by radioactive poisoning. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
"You don't accidentally or voluntarily absorb a source of polonium — it's not something that appears in the environment like that," said Patrice Mangin, director of the laboratory which examined Arafat's remains and his underclothes and a travel bag that he had with him in his final days.
He said his team could not say unequivocally what killed Arafat, who was 75 years old.
Israel once again denied it was behind Arafat’s death -- an accusation made repeatedly by Palestinian officials.
"We never made a decision to harm him physically," said Israeli Energy Minister Silvan Shalom, who was foreign minister at the time of the death. "In my opinion, this is a tempest in a tea cup. But even if it was (poisoning), it certainly was not Israel."
It found the remains and burial soil contained elevated levels of polonium-210 -- the same radioactive substance that was slipped into a cup of tea in a London hotel to kill defecting Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 .. [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92082371 ]. From his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his murder.
Francoi Bochud, a radiophysicist involved in the Swiss report, said polonium can be obtained with authorization, noting that his own lab receives it in liquid form for research. In that form, Bochud said, just a minuscule amount slipped into food or drink would be lethal within about a month.
Polonium can be a byproduct of the chemical processing of uranium, but usually is made artificially in a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator. Israel has a nuclear research center and is widely believed to have a nuclear arsenal, but remains ambiguous about the subject.
In a statement put out by his office, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged official Palestinian bodies to "follow up the investigation and to reveal all the facts about the death of the late leader Yasser Arafat, and to put the whole truth before the Palestinian people and the world."
Miri Eisin, a former colonel in the Israeli army, dismissed the new claims as a “conspiracy theory,” adding that Israel was often blamed unfairly.
“We were accused of 9/11,” she said. “We've been accused of anything you could think of including the fact that there are sharks in the Red Sea that attacked people.
“Somebody died. It's not nice, it's not convenient and people want to point fingers.”
Slideshow: Yasser Arafat, in pictures
AP
See key moments and memorable scenes from Yasser Arafat's life.
Palestinian people From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Palestinian people (Levantine Arabic| [...], ash-sha‘b al-Filas?ini), also referred to as Palestinians (Levantine Arabic|[...], al-Filas?iniyyun), are the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries, and who today are largely culturally and linguistically Arab due to Arabization of the region. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine, the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2004, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.6 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2.3 million versus close to 500,000 Jewish Israeli citizens which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and 16.5% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, three-quarters of a million in the West Bank, and about a quarter of a million in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless lacking citizenship in any country. About 2.6 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan where they make up approximately half the population, 1.5 million live between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter of a million in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Arab world.
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