Russia: Head of Agency Claims It Found No Poison on Palestinian Leader’s Body

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/world/europe/arafat.html

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The head of a Russian forensics agency said Tuesday that samples from the body of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had revealed no traces of radioactive polonium, a Russian news agency reported. If confirmed, the findings would deal a blow to Palestinian suspicions that Mr. Arafat was assassinated by Israel, a theory fueled by a Swiss lab report last year that found unusual amounts of an isotope of polonium on his clothes.

A Palestinian medical team took samples from Mr. Arafat’s corpse in the West Bank last year and gave them to Swiss, French and Russian forensic teams in an attempt to determine whether he was killed with the radioactive poison. “He could not have been poisoned with polonium,” the Russian news agency Interfax quoted Vladimir Uiba, who heads the Federal Medico-Biological Agency, as saying. “The research conducted by Russian experts found no traces of this substance.”

However, the agency later denied that it had made an official statement about the research, saying only that it had handed its results to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Ministry declined to make any immediate comment. Mr. Arafat died at age 75 of an unexplained ailment he developed while confined to his Ramallah headquarters by Israeli tanks at the height of an armed Palestinian uprising in 2004.