France Drops Arafat Poisoning Investigation

September 03, 2015

French judges investigating claims that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was murdered have closed the case without bringing any charges, a prosecutor said.

“At the end of the investigation … it has not been demonstrated that Mr Yasser Arafat was murdered by polonium-210 poisoning,” the three judges ruled on Wednesday, according to the prosecutor at Nanterre court near Paris.

The decision was blasted as biased by lawyers for Arafat’s widow Suha and rejected by the Palestinian Authority’s own inquiry committee.

Arafat died in Percy military hospital near Paris aged 75 in November 2004 after developing stomach pains while at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Many Palestinians accuse Israel of poisoning Arafat, a charge flatly denied by the Israeli government.

Arafat’s widow has claimed he was poisoned after an investigation showed that the Palestinian leader had abnormal levels of highly radioactive polonium in his bones and belongings.

But the judges ruled it out, saying there was “not sufficient evidence of an intervention by a third party who could have attempted to take his life”, the prosecutor said.

(Al Jazeera)