RAMALLAH (Dispatches) – A former member of Palestine’s Fatah Central Committee says that the Palestinian Authority (PA) knows the identity of the murderer of the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, but does not reveal it in a tactical move.
“What [former Qatari prime minister, Hamad] Bin Jassem said confirms what I have said over the past years, that Arafat’s killer is a criminal known to the Palestinian Authority and its leaders,” Ribhi Halloum told Quds Press.
The Palestinian Authority’s leadership has made a political decision not to reveal the identity of the real killer and to close the file permanently, Halloum explained.
Bin Jassim said, in an interview with the Kuwaiti Al-Qabas newspaper, that “the sudden change in Arafat’s health indicates that something was being hatched for him, and perhaps there were those who had given him something in order to eliminate him.”
“This is a fact. Yasser Arafat was certainly killed, and by people around him,” he added.
Arafat died on 11 November 2004, in a military hospital in the French capital, Paris, after his health deteriorated rapidly, after being besieged by the Zionist regime for several months in the presidential headquarters in the city of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.
Many Palestinians and Palestinian officials have repeatedly accused the Zionist regime of masterminding what they say was an assassination of their leader.
In 2011, Arafat’s widow Suha handed over some of the Palestinian leader’s personal effects to a reporter from Qatar-based Al Jazeera television news network, who passed them to the Institute of Applied Radiophysics in the Swiss city of Lausanne for tests.
A 108-page report by the institute found unnaturally high levels of polonium in Arafat’s ribs and pelvis, and in soil stained with his decaying organs.
But it stopped short of saying that he had been poisoned by the substance.
Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah was opened the same year, so that three teams of French, Swiss, and Russian investigators could collect samples for investigation.
French experts later claimed that the isotopes polonium-210 and lead-210, found in Arafat’s grave and in the samples, were of “an environmental nature”, as was suggested by the Swiss finding.
However, separate probes from Swiss and Russian experts found that Arafat had been poisoned to death with polonium.