Under pressure after the recent Al-Jazeera
nine-month
investigation of Arafat's death, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
has given final approval to dig up Yasser Arafat's remains and is also
pressing for an international investigation of his predecessor's death.
Suha
Arafat, who after his death had blocked requests for an post-mortem
autopsy examination, intends now to sue the French government,
demanding an investigation into his 2004 death.
On this background, see below my Jerusalem Post op-ed, a follow-up and update of my previous interview to Jerusalem Post.
Was Arafat poisoned with polonium? If so, by whom?
By Ely Karmon
Jerusalem Post, July 12, 2012
The
Al Jazeera investigation seems to be an attempt to accuse and
delegitimize not only Israel, but perhaps much more so Mahmoud Abbas
and the PA leadership.
In
an interview with Yaakov Lappin published in The Jerusalem Post on July
5, 2012, I asserted that considering polonium 210’s 138-day halflife,
the abnormally high levels of polonium discovered by specialists at the
Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Yasser Arafat’s
belongings eight years after his death could mean the polonium was
planted much later.
In
the interview I asked why the Al Jazeera investigators did not check
the various homes of Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat’s widow, and her
lawyer, where Arafat’s belongings were kept during all these years, to
find traces of polonium, as the British did in their investigation of
the famous Alexander Litvinenko case.
I
also asked why Suha, who was the only person to be extremely close to
Arafat during his stay at the Paris hospital, and who kept his
belongings, was not poisoned as well; she had no symptoms of polonium
poisoning.
In
the Litvinenko case not only did Litvinenko himself die, three of his
associates were also hospitalized, and the polonium also contaminated a
number of their children and tainted their offices, meeting places,
vehicles and residences. Part of the spillage occurred weeks before he
was admitted to the hospital.
The
Palestinian Authority conducted several investigations after Arafat
died in 2004, finding that his body guards and the people around him,
including those who had dined with him, showed no symptoms of having
been poisoned.
It
should be stressed that Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de
Radiophysique in Lausanne, told Reuters that the institute’s experts
had found “surprisingly” high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat’s
belongings but that the “clinical symptoms described in Arafat’s
medical reports were not consistent with polonium- 210 [poisoning] and
that conclusions could not be drawn as to whether the Palestinian
leader was poisoned or not.”
According
to Le Monde medical specialist Jean-Yves Nau, who covered Arafat’s
hospitalization in Paris, the results obtained by the Institute of
Radiation Physics of Lausanne are inconsistent with the examinations
conducted by the Radiation Protection Service of the French army.
According
to a reliable source cited by Nau, various analyses were performed on
Arafat’s urine samples which ruled out the presence of radioactivity,
although polonium- 210 was not looked for specifically.
Given
the characteristics of this radioactive element, says this French
source, if it is still detectable eight years later it is unthinkable
that the French specialists were not able to identify it in 2004.
In
the Al Jazeera video of the investigation, the presenter mentions that
the 2004 analyses only checked for the presence of gamma radiation, but
the above source says alpha and beta radiation were also ruled out. It
is the alpha radiation produced by ingested polonium that causes
illness.
This
leads to one of two conclusions: either Suha Arafat did not give Al
Jazeera her husband’s complete medical file or somebody decided to
claim the French had simply not checked for alpha and beta radiation,
which seems highly improbable if they were looking for a radiation
poisoning.
Al Jazeera, and Suha Arafat herself, hint that Israel most probably was behind the poisoning.
CONSPIRACY
THEORIES began to surface immediately after Arafat’s death. Ahmed
Jibril, leader of the notorious terrorist group PFLP-General Command,
publicly claimed Arafat had died of AIDs. Others accused Israel of
poisoning him.
However,
even if polonium poisoning was responsible for his death, polonium,
like other radioactive agents, can be transported relatively easily; it
needs only a plastic capsule for containment because it radiates only
alpha rays.
In
1999 a Russian army officer was caught trying to smuggle a radioactive
mixture of polonium and beryllium, stolen from the Baikonur cosmodrome,
from Kazakhstan into Uzbekistan. Other cases involve the theft of
several canisters of polonium 210 from All Russian Research Institute
of Experimental Physics in the city of Sarov.
IAEA
inspectors detected polonium in Iran in 2000. In 2004 the IAEA
established that Iran had been conducting experiments with polonium 210
as part of its nuclear program, possibly using material obtained from
Russia.
Politically,
the Al Jazeera investigation, on the background of the uprisings in the
Arab world, which have not yet seriously impacted on the PA, seems to
be an attempt to accuse and delegitimize not only Israel, but perhaps
much more so Mahmoud Abbas and the PA leadership. They have found in
Suha Arafat a willing partner in this endeavor as she is accused, among
many others by Palestinian journalist Khalid Amaryeh, of “inheriting”
hundreds of millions of dollars “registered under her deceased
husband’s name in several European banks,” money which belonged to the
Palestine Liberation Organization.
All rights reserved © 1995 - 2012 The Jerusalem Post.
Ely Karmon, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scholar
International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and
The Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at
The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC)
Herzlyia, Israel
Tel.: 972-9-9527277
Cell.: 972-52-2653306
Fax.: 972-9-9513073, 972-9-7716653
E-mail:
ekarmon@idc.ac.il
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