Exclusive: Swiss study says polonium found in Arafat's bones
 Print This
By Axis of Logic commentary. Aljazeera: David Poort and Ken Silverstein.
Axis of Logic. Aljazeera (article)
Friday, Nov 8, 2013
Axis of Logic Editorial
|
|
A rare and highly radioactive element with no stable isotopes, polonium is chemically similar to bismuth and tellurium, and it occurs in uranium ores. Polonium is highly dangerous and has no biological role. By mass, polonium-210 is around 250,000 times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide (the actual LD50 for 210Po is less than 1 microgram for an average adult (see below) compared with about 250 milligrams for hydrogen cyanide. The main hazard is its intense radioactivity ... Alpha particles emitted by polonium will damage organic tissue easily if polonium is ingested, inhaled, or absorbed... One gram of 210Po could thus in theory poison 20 million people of whom 10 million would die ... In addition to the acute effects, radiation exposure (both internal and external) carries a long-term risk of death from cancer of 5–10% per Sv. The general population is exposed to small amounts of polonium as a radon daughter in indoor air; the isotopes 214Po and 218Po are thought to cause the majority of the estimated 15,000–22,000 lung cancer deaths in the US every year that have been attributed to indoor radon. The target organs for polonium in humans are the spleen and liver.
Various scientific sources
cited in Wikipedia
|
| Swiss scientists who conducted tests on samples taken from Yasser
Arafat’s body have found at least 18 times the normal levels of
radioactive polonium in his remains.
|
“Yasser Arafat died of polonium poisoning. We found the smoking gun that
caused his death. What we don’t know is who’s holding the gun at the
time. I would point to him being given a fatal dose. I don't think there's any doubt at all. The level of polonium in Yasser Arafat’s rib…is about 900
milibecquerels. That is either 18 or 36 times the average, depending on
the literature.
- Dave Barclay, renowned UK forensic
|
“We are revealing a real crime, a political assassination. This has
confirmed all our doubts... It is scientifically proved that he didn’t
die a
natural death... I can’t accuse anyone, but how many countries have an
atomic reactor that can produce polonium?”
- Suha Arafat, wife of slain Palestinian
Leader Yasser Arafat (Aljazeera)
|
Based upon Michael Karpin's , The bomb in the basement: How Israel went nuclear and what that means for the world,
"Karpin reveals in the book that polonium 210, the radioactive substance used to poison Litvinenko, killed several Israeli scientists a few decades ago. The Weizmann Institute scientists were exposed to the dangerous substance, which was found at a number of London sites the late spy had visited, as well as in three British Airways planes that flew the Moscow-London route.
"According to the book, in 1957 a leak was discovered at a Weizmann Institute laboratory operated by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Traces of polonium 210 were found on the hands of Prof. Dror Sadeh, a physicist who researched radioactive materials, as well as on various objects in the professor's home. The AEC handled the accident with deep secrecy. After a short investigation, whose results were not presented to even the workers, the lab was hermetically sealed for several months.
"A month after the lab closed, a physics student died of leukemia. A few years later, Prof. Yehuda Wolfson, Sadeh's direct supervisor, also died, and Prof. Amos de Shalit, the department's director, died of cancer in 1969 at age 43.
"When the leak was discovered, Sadeh was terribly anxious, but tests indicated he was well. But according to Karpin's book, the tests did not include his bone marrow. Sadeh and his wife hid the facts from their family and friends until he died prematurely. The cause of death was cancer.
"The Israeli authorities did not admit that the leak and the deaths were connected, but people close to Sadeh confirmed that the state took responsibility for the accident and compensated his family."
|
"Testing of his body tissues could also isolate the nuclear facility
from which the polonium was produced. If Israel killed him, it would’ve
been far smarter to have procured Russian polonium than to have used
material from Israel’s Dimona reactor. But if the material is from
Dimona, the killers would then be exposed.... It makes perfect sense
that Israeli intelligence, learning about both the accident and its
repercussions for the health of the lab workers, would be interested in
learning everything it could about polonium poisoning. When you have a
lemon, you make lemonade, right?"
|
In August 2003, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz declared “all out war” on the militants whom he vowed “marked for death.”
“In mid September, Israel’s government passed a law to get rid of Arafat. Israel’s cabinet for political security affairs declared it 'a decision to remove Arafat as an obstacle to peace.” Mofaz threatened; 'we will choose the right way and the right time to kill Arafat.' Palestinian Minister Saeb Erekat told CNN he thought Arafat was the next target. CNN asked Sharon spokesman Ra’anan Gissan if the vote meant expulsion of Arafat. Gissan clarified;
'It doesn’t mean that. The Cabinet has today resolved to remove this obstacle. The time, the method, the ways by which this will take place will be decided separately, and the security services will monitor the situation and make the recommendation about proper action'.”
|
All of these findings along with the powerful evidence reported by Swiss scientists for the political assassination of Yasser Arafat renew our questions surrounding the untimely death of former President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías and the case for his assassination by induced cancer. One of the west's #1 political enemies and controlling the world's greatest petroleum reserves, Chávez died during a period when 5 other Latin American leaders had been diagnosed with cancer, a statistical improbability. Of course the corporate media either ignores or laughs at such 'conspiracy theories' - just as they skoff at recent death threats made against President Maduro and new irrefutable evidence of imperialist attacks on the Venezuelan economy. The following Aljazeera report on the results of testing for polonium in Yasser Arafat's remains, his clothing and toothpaste, "probably slipped as a powder, into his drink, food, eye drops or toothpaste" - eliminates any doubt that assassins with the means, motive, and opportunity and a history of "decapitation" of their enemies, carry out political assassinations today.
- Les Blough, Editor
Axis of Logic
|
|
A mural of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Photo: Ahmad Gharabli
|
Scientists find at least 18 times the normal levels of radioactive element in late Palestinian leader’s remains.
November 06, 2013, Paris, France - Swiss scientists who conducted tests on samples taken from Yasser Arafat’s body have found at least 18 times the normal levels of radioactive polonium in his remains. The scientists said that they were confident up to an 83 percent level that the late Palestinian leader was poisoned with it, which they said “moderately supports” polonium as the cause of his death.
A 108-page report by the University Centre of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, which was obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera, found unnaturally high levels of polonium in Arafat’s ribs and pelvis, and in soil stained with his decaying organs.
The Swiss scientists, along with French and Russian teams, obtained the samples last November after his body was exhumed from a mausoleum in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
Dave Barclay, a renowned UK forensic scientist and retired detective, told Al Jazeera that with these results he was wholly convinced that Arafat was murdered.
“Yasser Arafat died of polonium poisoning,” he said. “We found the smoking gun that caused his death. What we don’t know is who’s holding the gun at the time.”
“The level of polonium in Yasser Arafat’s rib…is about 900 milibecquerels,” Barclay said. “That is either 18 or 36 times the average, depending on the literature.”
Suha Arafat, the late Palestinian leader’s widow, received a copy of the report in Paris on Tuesday. “When they came with the results, I’m mourning Yasser again,” she said. “It’s like you just told me he died.”
The Swiss report only examined the question of what killed Arafat. It did not address the question of whether he was deliberately poisoned or how.
By October of 2004, towards the end of the second intifada, Arafat had been holed up for more than two years in his Ramallah presidential compound, which Israeli troops had surrounded and partly razed. He was elderly and frail but his medical reports show he “was in good overall health and did not have any particular risk factors,” the Swiss report states.
On the evening of October 12, Arafat suddenly fell ill after eating a meal. Based on his symptoms - nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain - his personal doctor initially diagnosed flu.
But Arafat’s heath deteriorated swiftly and Egyptian and Tunisian doctors flown in to see him could not pinpoint the source of his sickness.
On October 29, a wan and weak Arafat was carried in a wheelchair from his headquarters. He waved and blew kisses to the crowd outside and flew to Jordan by helicopter. From there a French government plane carried him to Paris for emergency treatment at Percy military hospital.
French doctors were unable to diagnose or halt Arafat’s decline and he soon lapsed into a coma. On November 11, Arafat, who symbolised the fight for Palestinian statehood, died at the age of 75.
Doctors at Percy hospital did not conduct an autopsy, announce the cause of death or release his medical records, which heightened speculation about the cause of his rapid demise. Many Palestinian officials close to Arafat believed he had been poisoned. In the West, rumours circulated that he had died of Aids. Some doctors suggested leukaemia or a food-borne illness had killed Arafat; others proposed that he had simply succumbed to old age.
By 2011, when Al Jazeera began an investigation, Arafat’s death was a cold case. During the investigation, Suha Arafat gave the network access to her late husband’s full medical records and a bag of his belongings, including clothing he wore during his final days. Tests conducted by the Swiss scientists who issued the new report found elevated levels of polonium-210, one of the element’s isotopes, in blood, sweat and urine stains on Arafat’s clothes.
In July 2012, Al Jazeera broadcast the results of its investigation in What Killed Arafat? The documentary triggered a French murder investigation and led to the exhumation of Arafat’s remains. Sixty samples of his body tissue were taken and twenty each distributed to the Swiss team, a French team of judges and forensic experts assigned to the murder investigation, and a Russian group invited at the request of the Palestinian Authority.
The Russians are expected to disclose their results soon. The French are not expected to release their results before the murder investigation concludes.
Saad Djebbar, Suha Arafat’s lawyer, said the Swiss report was a “significant piece of the jigsaw puzzle” that could help the French murder inquiry.
A rare but lethal poison
Polonium is a soft, silvery-grey metal found in uranium ore. The isotope polonium-210 emits highly radioactive alpha particles, but they do not travel more than a few centimetres in air and are "stopped by a sheet of paper or by the dead layer of outer skin on our bodies,” says the International Atomic Energy Agency.
For that reason polonium-210 is not a risk to human health as long as it remains outside the body. But a dose of 0.1 of a microgramme - the size of a speck of dust weighing less than a millionth of a snowflake - would be fatal if it were ingested in food or liquids or inhaled in contaminated air.
Only a handful of people are reported to have died from polonium poisoning. The most famous case involves Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer turned dissident who received political asylum from the British government and lived in London.
Litvinenko died in November 2006, three weeks after meeting several Russians, including a one-time KGB officer, at London's Millennium Hotel. A British public prosecutor alleges that the Russians were acting at the behest of their government and poisoned Litvinenko by lacing his tea with polonium-210.
Polonium-210 is “one of the most obscure, most bizarre, and yet most merciless of poisons,” writes Alan Cowell in The Terminal Spy, a book about the Litvinenko case.
It was used as a trigger for early nuclear weapons and subsequently as a power source for satellites and spacecraft. However, polonium-210 is extremely rare and would be difficult to obtain without the help of a government or access to a nuclear reactor. It also requires considerable scientific know-how to handle in a safe manner.
Polonium-210 is manufactured by bombarding bismuth-209 with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. Only about 100 grammes are produced each year, almost all in Russia.
In terms of motive, the chief suspects would be Arafat’s Palestinian rivals or the Israeli government, his sworn enemy. Ariel Sharon, the prime minister in 2004, viewed Arafat as a “terrorist” and called his death "a turning point in Middle Eastern history”. A year earlier, then-Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said killing Arafat ''is definitely one of the options”.
However, Israel has always vehemently denied it had anything to do with Arafat’s sickness or death and to date no evidence has emerged that implicates it.
While Barclay expressed confidence in the cause of death, he said it would be a difficult case to solve.
“The main problem is the timeframe,” he said. “If this was a murder that happened yesterday you’d have witnesses and cell phone records, emails, bank transfers. In a nine-year-old case that type of information will be hard to obtain.”
“We can’t point a finger at anyone,” Suha Arafat said. “The French are conducting a serious investigation. It takes time.”
Sources
Aljazeera, The Lancet, Arab News, The Guardian, Haaretz,
Richard Silverstein
|
© Copyright 2014 by AxisofLogic.com
This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the
article in its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of
Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you!
 Print This
|
