viewpoint: ben cohen

Why Arafat murder myth stays alive

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Like a mini-series staggering to the end of its 10th season, the latest probe into the alleged murder of Yasser Arafat, the former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader who died in Paris in 2004, recently passed an entirely predictable milestone when French investigators announced that they were closing the case without bringing any charges.

In their ruling, the investigative judges said that there was “not sufficient evidence of an intervention by a third party who could have attempted to take [Arafat’s] life.” Nor were there any grounds to believe that Arafat was poisoned by polonium-210, a highly radioactive isotope, as was alleged by Arafat’s widow, Suha, when she filed murder charges in 2012 at the district court in the Nanterre suburb of Paris. Directly as a result of Suha’s insistence that her husband was murdered, Arafat’s body was briefly exhumed from its burial spot in the West Bank city of Ramallah, in order for French, Russian, and Swiss investigators to gather samples.

What a waste of time and money. The French conclusion that there was nothing to underpin the Arafat murder claim came almost two years after the Russians arrived at the same determination. In December 2013, having conducted the requisite tests, Vladimir Uiba, the head of the Russian Federal Medical and Biological Agency, declared that the PLO leader had died of natural causes. (The Russians, incidentally, know a good deal about the deadly impact of polonium, having allegedly used it in the 2006 assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence officer and stalwart critic of President Vladimir Putin.)

Will the French announcement mean that there will finally be an end to the chatter about Arafat’s murder? Regrettably, there are good reasons to think not. 

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