GAZA, November 11 (RIA Novosti) – Russian experts will be part of an international group tasked with exhuming the body of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, alleged to have been poisoned by polonium, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday.
“In cooperation with Swiss and Russian experts and French investigators, we are working on finding new facts that reveals the reasons behind the death of Arafat,” Abbas said in a speech marking the eighth anniversary of Arafat’s passing, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
The exhumation is set to take place later this month.
Arafat, Palestine’s leader for two decades and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died in Paris in 2004, his death attributed, alternatively, to either illness or poison.
French authorities launched a check into Arafat’s death last summer after a check at the Institute of Radiation Physics at the University of Lausanne indicated that he may have died of poisoning by polonium-210, a radioactive element.
Polonium was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko, a deflector from KGB’s successor FSB who died in London in 2006. Two of his ex-colleagues have been implicated in the murder, though both denied the charges, and the investigation is still ongoing.
