Yasser Arafat's exhumation could shed light on 'poisoning'

A Palestinian boy holds a poster of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat One of the biggest Middle East enigmas could come closer to a resolution on Tuesday, as remains of iconic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were exhumed to enable investigators to seek traces of poison. Arafat's remains were movedout of his mausoleum and taken to a mosque. Experts began taking samples to be tested for signs of poisoning; the process began at 5:00 am (0300 GMT) in the presence of French, Swiss and Russian experts.
"The operation is finished, the tomb has been resealed and the samples have been given to the French, Swiss and Russian experts," officials from the Palestinian commission investigating Arafat's death said. The samples will be flown to laboratories in the three countries involved, with results expected within several months.
The process will cap eight years of speculation about whether the former president was murdered, as many Palestinians believe.
French judges in charge of the investigation arrived on Sunday in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Arafat's mausoleum stands in the grounds of the Muqataa complex, from which the late leader ruled and where President Mahmud Abbas has his headquarters.
Rumours and speculation have surrounded Arafat's death ever since a quick deterioration of his health before he died at the Percy military hospital near Paris in November 2004 at the age of 75.
Doctors were unable at the time to say what killed the Palestinians' first democratically-elected president and an autopsy was never performed, at his widow Suha's request.
But many Palestinians believed he was poisoned by Israel - a theory that gained ground in July when Al-Jazeera reported Swiss findings showing abnormal quantities of the radioactive substance polonium on Arafat's personal effects.
France opened a formal murder inquiry in late August at Suha's request.
Polonium was the substance that killed Russian ex-spy and fierce Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Experts from the Swiss lab that tested the samples for the Al-Jazeera news network will work alongside the French investigators. Russian specialists will also be taking part in the process, at the request of the Palestinian leadership.
Some experts, however, have questioned whether anything conclusive will be found because polonium has a short life and dissipates quicker than some other radioactive substances.
Jean-Rene Jourdain, deputy head of human protection at the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), cautioned it would take several weeks of analysis to be sure that the traces were man-made polonium rather than just coincidental contamination by naturally-occurring polonium.