I'm a bit too busy to do this blog at the moment but sometimes a story comes up that is so weird you think ...I've got to make time...
The other day I heard a Zionist say on Twitter that no Palestinian had ever won a Nobel Peace Prize and so I said “Yasser Arafat did”. Then I remembered why. He won one for the Oslo Peace accords with Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin was also rewarded for his peace efforts by being assassinated and Yasser I guessed had long since shuffled off his mortal coil due to old age. Or did he?
It must have slipped me by at the time as I was on bigger tings but after Arafat died in 2004 of a stroke, Al Jazeera carried out a nine-month investigation in which they concluded that there was a suspicious amount of Polonium on his personal belongings. Swiss experts studied 38 of Arafat’s clothes/belongings and discovered that the levels of Polonium were rather high. Polonium is number 210 on the periodic table – there’s not a lot of it about. Their paper was so plausible it made it into top UK medical journal “The Lancet”? So was he assassinated? Or was it contamination from somewhere else? If so how would he have picked it up? A further different Swiss team, a French team and a Russian team then all attempted a similar analysis to see if they could simulate the same results as the original team. The Swiss forensic team did a bone analysis from Yasser’s body which had not been cremated and found levels of polonium in Arafat's ribs and pelvis 18 to 36 times normal. Keep in mind that the Polonium isotopes are unstable so the level would have been even higher when he was buried – the half-life of Polonium 210 is 138 days. Al Jazeera produced a forensic scientist to say that this was a “smoking gun” whilst another professor at University College London remarked it was as fishy as an aquarium.
Okay, what he actually said was “it seems likely what they're doing is putting a very cautious interpretation of strong data”.
The French and Russian teams claimed however that they could not replicate the analysis and found no Polonium. Palestinian official Wasel Abu Yousef however remained convinced that “The French report is politicized and is contrary to all the evidence which confirms that the president was killed by poisoning".
Even if this wasn’t true one might expect more publicity about the case given what happened with the other well known poisoning case … Mr Litvinenko…. It took only 10 micrograms of 210 Po to kill Alexander.
From a political perspective the most worrying thing about this case is not whether or not Yasser was murdered but the thought that if he was then both* the main Oslo Accord Nobel Peace Prize winners were assassinated… so what hope is there?
The other question is that, if this wasn’t an assassination attempt …where did the Polonium 210 come from? As a highly unstable element … you can’t mine it … the only place it comes from is from a nuclear reactor …I think you have to bombard bismuth 209 Bi with neutrons? Was someone trying to build a bomb? Maybe … but in a hospital? Then again, the IDF tells us these days that all Palestinian hospitals are actually hiding Hamas soldiers so …er… whatever…
The original paper can be found here (you’ll forgive me if I can’t be arsed with proper Havard Referencing it’s been a long day – please don’t sack me for poor referencing like Dr. Claudine Gay)
And here’s the Abstract…
In 2011, we found abnormal levels of polonium-210 ((210)Po) in some of Arafat's belongings that were worn during his final hospital stay and which were stained with biological fluids. This finding led to the exhumation of Arafat's remains in 2012. Significantly higher (up to 20 times) activities of (210)Po and lead-210 ((210)Pb) were found in the ribs, iliac crest and sternum specimens compared to reference samples from the literature (p-value <1%). In all specimens from the tomb, (210)Po activity was supported by a similar activity of (210)Pb. Biokinetic calculations demonstrated that a (210)Pb impurity, as identified in a commercial source of 3MBq of (210)Po, may be responsible for the activities measured in Arafat's belongings and remains 8 years after his death. The absence of myelosuppression and hair loss in Mr Arafat's case compared to Mr Litvinenko's, the only known case of malicious poisoning with (210)Po, could be explained by differences in the time delivery-scheme of intake.
In conclusion, statistical Bayesian analysis combining all the evidence gathered in our forensic expert report moderately supports the proposition that Mr Arafat was poisoned by (210)Po.
*the other person to share the prize Shimon Peres fell off his perch naturally in 2016
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