Arafat did not die of poisoning, French tests conclude

[oberliner]

(Reuters) - Yasser Arafat was not the victim of poisoning, French forensic scientists concluded on Tuesday, countering a Swiss report on the 2004 death of the Palestinian leader that found he was probably killed with radioactive polonium.

The French conclusions were immediately challenged by his widow, Suha Arafat, who has argued the death was a political assassination by someone close to her husband. A senior Palestinian official dismissed the report as "politicized".

"You can imagine how much I am shaken by the contradictions between the findings of the best experts in Europe in this domain," Suha Arafat, dressed in black and reading from a written statement, told a news conference in Paris.

"I am accusing no one. This is in the hands of justice and it is just the beginning," she said, requesting that the Swiss report be made available to French magistrates examining the case following a legal complaint she filed.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/03/us-palestinians-arafat-idUSBRE9B20DI20131203

[MADem]

1. Didn't he die in France?

I imagine the French government doesn't want to say that world leaders can get poisoned on their watch....?

I have no idea what killed him, all I know is that he went downhill FAST. It seemed a bit odd to me.

[Scootaloo]

2. So that's the French and the Russians

Now granted, the Swiss are the only one of the three without a political stake there, so... But either way, one wonders why hte Swiss turned up so much evidence of poisoning and the other two did not. I don't imagine Polonium is easy to get a false positive on, but I could be wrong?

[oberliner]

3. Did you not read the article?

There is no claim of a "false positive" - the French report, like the Swiss one, indicates that traces of Polonium were found.

As Arafat's widow puts it:

"Is it the poisoned body that contaminated the immediate external environment, the Swiss thesis or the opposite, is it the external environment, the radioactive radon gas, that explains the presence of polonium-210 in the body."

[Scootaloo]

7. I must have derped over it, yeah

Now the trouble is... Radon doesn't usually decay into Polonium-210. It decays into polonium-218. And polonium 218 has a half-life of a few minutes before becoming lead-216 (still perfectly toxic no matter what, of course!)

I suppose if there's a hell of a lot of Uranium in Ramallah, or if the labs stored their samples next to the community bucket of thorium nuggets...?

[shaayecanaan]

5. I'd agree with you...

The French report concluded that some of the radioactivity could be explained by the presence of radon gas in the tomb where Arafat was buried. The Swiss experts said on the contrary that the level of radon gas was due to the radioactivity in his body.

If that is indicative of the quality of the French report, then I don't think much of it.

Radon itself has a very short half-life (about four days). If Radon was found in significant quantities in Arafat's tomb (ie, above naturally-occurring background levels), then it would almost certainly be due to decay of other radioactive elements within the tomb.

I am not sure why the French would take such an unsustainable position, particularly in light of the fact that they already had the Swiss report.

It should also be remembered that French intelligence initiated the rumour that Arafat died of AIDS after contracting HIV during an enthusiastic bout of gay sex with his bodyguards. Their impartiality in this area is frankly suspect.

[shira]

4. Well, the headlines made for nice anti-Jewish libel & propaganda for weeks.

So mission accomplished.