Tests Indicate Yasser Arafat May Have Died Of Polonium Poisoning...Update: Arafat's Rotten Corpse To Be Exhumed

What dreadful news. Tsk, tsk.

Recent tests conducted on Yasser Arafat's personal belongings at the time of his unexpected death in 2004 suggest his body contained abnormal levels of radioactive polonium, the same poisonous substance that killed Russian spy-turned-dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Al-Jazeera TV reports.

Al-Jazeera says its nine-month investigation found that Arafat was in good health until he fell suddenly ill Oct. 12, 2004, at his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. He was flown to a French miitary hospital in Paris, where he died several days later.

No autopsy was performed on the longtime Palestinian leader, who died at the age of 74.

Al-Jazeera says the tests on his clothes, including his toothbrush and kaffiyeh, were conducted by the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland.

"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," Francois Bochud, the director of the institute, tells Al-Jazeera.

Additional tests, conducted over a three-month period from March until June, concluded that most of that polonium found in samples of body fluids -- sweat and urine -- on Arafat's clothes, was "unsupported," meaning that it did not come from natural sources.

Read rest here... 

Update:

(ABC News) -- Palestinians leaders agreed Wednesday to exhume the body of Yasser Arafat after a television documentary suggested that he had been assassinated while being treated in a Paris hospital.

Arafat was 75 and had long been ill when he slipped into a coma and died on Nov. 11, 2004. He had been suffering from a mysterious illness. The cause of the death was never determined and French medical officials would not release details of his illness because of privacy laws. The medical report was given to his family.

The television network al Jazeera broadcast a documentary this week in which a Swiss institute examined clothing provided by Arafat's widow, Suha, and determined there were high levels of polonium-210, the same substance found to have killed a former Russian spy in London in 2006.

Suha Arafat has since called for her husband's body to be exhumed from its mausoleum in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Presidential adviser Nabil Abu Rdeineh said Wednesday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has given instructions to launch an investigation with international experts to look into the findings of the al Jazeera report.