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| Yasser Arafat's mausoleum, where tarpaulin obscured the entrance during his exhumation. Samples taken from corpse of late PLO leader will be used to investigate claims he was poisoned with a radioactive substance |
Yasser Arafat was buried eight years ago to a chorus
of gunfire before a crowd of thousands amid the rubble of his Ramallah
headquarters.
On Tuesday, his corpse was quietly dug up again in
the middle of the night, shielded from prying eyes, to test a suspicion that
the Palestine Liberation Organisation leader was poisoned with a radioactive
substance.
The
tests were in part prompted by a
French murder inquiry requested by Arafat's widow. But there's a
good chance they will not provide the answers many Palestinians want to hear.
And even if the tests do show he was poisoned, they are also likely to raise
unsettling questions many may not want to face.
At Arafat's
funeral in 2004, Palestinians packed the Muqata - the old British administration
building that served as his headquarters after his return to the West Bank -
and every rooftop within sight as his coffin was navigated through the
chanting, shooting crowds, past the rubble left by the Israeli siege to a
hastily dug grave site.
The Muqata has been rebuilt, after large parts were
destroyed by Israeli tanks, and transformed into a sprawling presidential
palace of Jerusalem stone. Arafat's mausoleum is now a towering quadrangle of
limestone and glass, a reflecting pool, and an honour guard.
But all of that was hidden behind large blue
tarpaulins, hung to shield the exhumation from outsiders as at around midnight
workers began the lengthy process of drilling down through metres of concrete
poured over the coffin.
Before dawn, Arafat's remains were finally reached.
A Palestinian doctor and foreign forensic experts looked at the state of the
corpse and decided against attempting to remove the whole thing. The
Palestinian doctor instead took only samples, which were moved to a mosque
where they were prepared for examination by international teams from France,
Russia and Switzerland.
This time, the streets and rooftops around the
Muqata were abandoned - although that did not mean there was no interest.
Many
ordinary Palestinians have long believed Arafat was murdered byIsrael, but they are divided over whether
that warrants digging him up.
"He should have been left alone," said
Munir Jaara at a coffee shop close to the Muqata. "We all know the
Israelis killed him so what's it going to prove to disturb his body? It's disrespectful."
Ghada Nayfeh differed. "We need to find the
truth. It was very suspicious how he died, just like that, under siege from the
Israelis," she said.
The speed of Arafat's death at 75 after a short
unexplained illness fed the suspicions of foul play that took hold among
Palestinians almost immediately after his funeral even though French officials
determined he died at a Paris military hospital from a stroke caused by a blood
disorder.
Arafat's
widow, Suha, refused to permit apostmortem examination at the time. But earlier this
year she gave some of her late husband's personal items that were with him when
he died, including his toothbrush, underwear & iconic kaffiyeh,
to Al Jazeera television which
sent them to Switzerland for tests. The Institut de Radiophysique discovered
abnormal levels of polonium-210, a radioactive substance linked to the death of
the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
However, the tests were inconclusive and so Suha
Arafat, a French citizen, asked the French government to launch a murder
inquiry. The Palestinian Authority, suspicious of Arafat's widow – who is not a
popular figure among Palestinians – and the French and Swiss experts, called in
Russian scientists to do separate analysis.
This week, French magistrates have been questioning
Palestinian officials who were besieged with Arafat in the Muqata because it's
unlikely the PLO leader's food or drink could have been poisoned without a
collaborator inside the building.
The Israelis had an opportunity to interfere with
food deliveries which passed through their checkpoints during the siege. But
they had no way of knowing who would be eating what and the fact that there was
no mass poisoning inside the Muqata would mean that Arafat's food was
contaminated by someone with direct access to it.
Israel has repeatedly denied killing Arafat and
called on the Palestinian leadership to release his medical records, which it
has steadfastly refused to do.
Six hours after he was dug up, Arafat was
reinterred with the same lack of fanfare. Plans for a ceremony with military
honours were called off when it was decided that the samples removed from the
coffin did not require a reburial.
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