While scientists at Switzerland’s Institute of Radiation Physics haven’t directly called it murder, they said “Yasser Arafat was deliberately poisoned with polonium though they don’t know if it ultimately killed him.” Arafat’s widow, Suha, however, called his death “a political assassination.”
Polonium-210 (Po-210) is the same radioactive substance used to kill Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Those of us deemed “kooky conspiracy theorists” by the corporate media and the left gatekeepers didn’t buy the official story about Arafat’s death, anymore than we bought Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who killed John F. Kennedy or that 19 Arabs armed with box cutters pulled off 9/11 at the direction of Osama bin Laden from a cave in Afghanistan. Well, now we aren’t such kooks when it comes to Arafat’s death.
The question is who contaminated Arafat? He had a lot of enemies, Israel being the foremost, followed by the US. Did the Israelis do it? Thanks to their nuclear weapons program at Dimona, they had the means. Poor Arafat was basically a prisoner in his Ramallah compound. Might it have been an insider in the employ of either Israel or the US, or a someone in the Palestinian opposition? Perhaps the butler did it. Maybe Colonel Mustard.
Arafat’s widow thinks it was someone in Arafat’s inner circle “because experts had told her the poison would have been put in his coffee, tea or water.”
The Palestinian leader died “under mysterious circumstances at a French military hospital in 2004 but the Swiss say the amounts of polonium and its byproducts, including lead, that they found in his bones and grave soil could not have been accidental.”
The 75-year-old Arafat fell ill at his West Bank compound in October 2004, suffering from acute gastroenteritis with diarrhea and vomiting. In November, he was flown on a French government airplane to the Percy military hospital in the Paris suburb of Clamart, where he died on November 11, 2004. The official cause of death was listed as a massive stroke, though “French doctors at the time were unable to determine the cause of his illness.” There was no autopsy.
Al Jazeera first reported last year that traces of polonium-2010 were found on Arafat’s personal effects given to his widow at the French hospital where he died. “That led French prosecutors to open an investigation for suspected murder in August 2012 at the request of Suha Arafat. Forensic experts from Switzerland, Russia and France all took samples from his corpse for testing after the Palestinian Authority agreed to open his mausoleum.”
According to al Jazeera, “the levels of polonium found in Arafat’s ribs, pelvis and in soil that absorbed his remains were at least 18 times higher than normal.”
While the Russian and French scientists have yet to report their findings, Mrs. Arafat has called for an investigation of the Muqata, the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah and she and her daughter, Zahwa, are going to pursue the case “through the courts in France and elsewhere until the perpetrators were brought to justice.”
Polonium-210, which is used as one of the initiators in a nuclear bomb to bring about critical mass, thus causing the bomb to implode, is produced naturally during the decay of uranium-238 and is found in small quantities in the earth’s crust. It also is produced by the decay of radon-222 gas.
“Po-210 can be manufactured artificially by irradiating stable bismuth-209 with thermal neutrons resulting in the formation of radioactive Bi-210, which decays (half-life 5 days) into Po-210. Polonium may now be made in milligram amounts in this procedure which uses high neutron fluxes found in nuclear reactors. Only about 100 grams are produced each year, making polonium exceedingly rare,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
“Po-210 is highly radioactive and chemically toxic element,” the IAEA notes. “Po-210 can enter the body through eating and drinking of contaminated food, breathing contaminated air or through a wound . . . People who come into contact with a person contaminated by Po-210 will not be at risk unless they ingest or inhale bodily fluids of the contaminated person.”
According to Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds, unless a person worked in a nuclear plant or dealt with radioactive isotopes, you would not expect to find Po-210 in his body. So that leaves only four possible ways for Po-210 to get into a person’s body: food, drink or air contaminated with it or introduction through an open wound.
Polonium poisoning is so rare that most doctors don’t recognize it.
So the question remains open: who spiked Arafat’s food or drink with Po-210 and with how much, given Po-210’s short half-life, since his remains and the soil that absorbed them contained an amount at least 18 times higher than normal nine years after his death?
Bev Conover is the editor and publisher of Intrepid Report. Email her at editor@intrepidreport.com.
Since you asked the who dunnit question Bev, my answer is that the U.S. and Israel partnered in taking down Arafat. I don’t think it was the Russians or France, since Arafat was historically the thorn in the side of the Israelis and their backers, the U.S. And we have a defense department sophisticated and vicious enough to create the Polonium-210.
Jerry Mazza.