Al Jazeera’s Arafat Polonium Story Around Since At Least 2006

Challah Hu Akbar

Today, Al-Jazeera announced the results of a 9 month investigation of the death of Yasir Arafat. Al Jazeera says that their investigation has discovered “rare, radioactive polonium on [Arafat’s] final belongings.”

It was a scene that riveted the world for weeks: The ailing Yasser Arafat, first besieged by Israeli tanks in his Ramallah compound, then shuttled to Paris, where he spent his final days undergoing a barrage of medical tests in a French military hospital.

 

Eight years after his death, it remains a mystery exactly what killed the longtime Palestinian leader. Tests conducted in Paris found no obvious traces of poison in Arafat’s system. Rumors abound about what might have killed him – cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, even allegations that he was infected with HIV. A nine-month investigation by Al Jazeera has revealed that none of those rumors were true: Arafat was in good health until he suddenly fell ill on October 12, 2004. 

More importantly, tests reveal that Arafat’s final personal belongings – his clothes, his toothbrush, even his iconic kaffiyeh – contained abnormal levels of polonium, a rare, highly radioactive element. Those personal effects, which were analyzed at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, were variously stained with Arafat’s blood, sweat, saliva and urine. The tests carried out on those samples suggested that there was a high level of polonium inside his body when he died. 

“I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr. Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids,” said Dr. Francois Bochud, the director of the institute.

Interestingly, Al Jazeera fails to note that in 2006 rabidanti-Semite Israel Shamir wrote that “Arafat’s post mortem revealed the presence of Polonium-210, the same poisonous medium that killed the Russian defector. However, the Masters of Discourse and their world-opinion-producing machine pooh-poohed this discovery and connected it to chemotherapy treatment possibly given to the Palestinian leader.”

Even more recently, in January 2011, Israel Radio reported that “A former Palestinian intelligence officer, attorney Fahmi Shabana, says that Yasser Arafat's political rivals were responsible for his death, and that he was poisoned with polonium.”

Conspiracy theories related to Arafat’s death have been around since 2004 and will likely never die. Al Jazeera’s latest will only fuel the fire.

Update: Al Jazeera itself reported on Shabana's comments in January 2011.

Update: Palestine Press reports that the Fatah Central Committee says that the Palestinian leadership is willing to cooperate to reveal the details of Arafat's death. Arafat's wife, Suha, has reportedly called for Arafat's body to be exhumed for additional testing.

Update: If one reads the report from the Institut de Radiophysique that the Al Jazeera piece is based on you will see that they did not reach a definite conclusion in their testing.

We therefore chose to conduct 210Po measurements on samples that had been manifestly worn by Mr. Louvet and where stains of residual biological liquids could be suspected by direct eye observation. 

Some of these samples show 210Po activities that are clearly above the values measured on other samples that had either not been worn or that were not containing visible suspect stains. 

This observation alone is however not sufficient to draw a final conclusion because out of the 10 measurements performed on local samples totally unrelated with Mr Louvet's belonging, two show 210Po activities above the value of 2 mBq/g, which can be set as a limit for background value.

Update: Mahmoud Abbas has reportedly ordered an investigation, which may also include an exhumation of Arafat's body. Two paragraphs in a Reuters report are interesting.

Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters on Tuesday it had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat's belongings. 

But he stressed that clinical symptoms described in Arafat's medical reports were not consistent with polonium-210 and that conclusions could not be drawn as to whether the Palestinian leader was poisoned or not.