PA to appeal closing of French probe into Arafat’s death

A senior Fatah official said Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority planned to appeal the decision to close the French inquiry into the death of Yasser Arafat over concerns investigators had concealed information.

In an interview on Palestinian public radio, Tawfik Tirawi said that French prosecutors contacted Palestinian officials last month requesting that, should their inquiry determine that the former president was poisoned — as the Palestinians claim — the PA would not execute anyone who may be implicated in the assassination.

Tirawi, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee who heads the official Palestinian investigation commission into Arafat’s death, claimed that the French request “indicated that the there is a secret the French want to cover up,” Israel Radio reported.

On Tuesday, a panel of French judges reexamining Arafat’s death concluded their investigation, and sent their findings to the prosecutor, who has three months to prepare submissions on whether to dismiss the case or put it forward to court.

In the meantime, interested parties can produce written depositions. However if, as is currently the case, there is no defendant’s name attached to the proceedings, the case is likely to be dismissed.

Arafat died aged 75 on November 11, 2004, at the Percy de Clamart hospital, close to Paris. He had been admitted there at the end of October that year after developing stomach pains while at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he had lived since December 2001, surrounded by the Israeli army.

Arafat’s widow Suha lodged a complaint at a court in Nanterre in 2012, claiming that her husband was assassinated, sparking the inquiry.

The same year, Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah was opened for a few hours allowing three teams of French, Swiss and Russian investigators to collect around 60 samples.

Many Palestinians believe that the Israelis poisoned Arafat with the complicity of some people in his entourage.

A center in the Swiss city of Lausanne had tested biological samples taken from Arafat’s personal belongings given to his widow after his death in Paris, and found “abnormal levels of polonium”, but stopped short of saying that he had been poisoned by the extremely radioactive toxin.

However, French experts “maintain that the polonium-210 and lead-210 found in Arafat’s grave and in the samples are of an environmental nature,” Nanterre prosecutor Catherine Denis said last month.

Polonium-210 became famous in 2006 when a fugitive Russian intelligence officer turned opponent of President Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, was killed in London by a strong dose of the hard-to-get radioactive isotope. Two Russian agents were the chief suspects for British police, but Moscow refused their extradition.