Arafat ‘poisoned’ with radioactive polonium

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned to death in 2004 with radioactive polonium, his widow Suha said yesterday after receiving the results of Swiss forensic tests on her husband’s corpse.

“We are revealing a real crime, a political assassination,” she told Reuters in Paris.

A team of experts, including from Lausanne University Hospital’s Institute of Radiation Physics, opened Arafat’s grave in the West Bank city of Ramallah last November, and took samples from his body to seek evidence of alleged poisoning.