Eight years after the death of iconic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, his remains were exhumed yesterday, with experts set to test for signs that the late president was poisoned.
The process was carried out in secrecy, with Arafat’s grave carefully shielded from the public eye and media kept far away, but Palestinian sources confirmed the remains had been removed for testing yesterday morning.
“At 5am, experts began to remove the stones and began opening the grave in an orderly fashion. The remains were then transferred to a mosque adjacent to the grave for the removal of samples,” a Palestinian source told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Photo: Reuters
The source said only a Palestinian doctor would be allowed to directly touch the remains and remove the samples, but that the process was being conducted in front of Swiss, Russian and French experts.
After the samples are removed, the remains are to be reburied in a military ceremony expected to be broadcast on Palestinian television.
The samples being collected are to be tested for the radioactive substance polonium in a new probe into whether Arafat was poisoned.
The probe was prompted by an investigation carried out by the al-Jazeera news channel, which commissioned a Swiss lab to test Arafat’s personal effects that were given to them by his widow, Suha.
The tests revealed the presence of the toxic substance polonium, and prompted calls for the exhumation of Arafat’s remains.
Polonium was the substance that killed Russian ex-spy and fierce Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
France opened a former murder inquiry into Arafat’s death in late August at Suha’s request and French judges in charge of the investigation arrived in Ramallah on Sunday to participate in the exhumation.
Rumors and speculation have surrounded Arafat’s death ever since the 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’s request.
However, many Palestinians believed he was poisoned by Israel — a theory that gained ground in July following the al-Jazeera report.
The samples will be flown to laboratories in the three countries involved, with results expected within several months.
However, some experts have questioned whether anything conclusive will be found because polonium has a short half-life.
Shamans in Peru on Monday gathered for an annual New Year’s ritual where they made predictions for the year to come, including illness for US President Donald Trump and the downfall of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “The United States should prepare itself because Donald Trump will fall seriously ill,” Juan de Dios Garcia proclaimed as he gathered with other shamans on a beach in southern Lima, dressed in traditional Andean ponchos and headdresses, and sprinkling flowers on the sand. The shamans carried large posters of world leaders, over which they crossed swords and burned incense, some of which they stomped on. In this
Near the entrance to the Panama Canal, a monument to China’s contributions to the interoceanic waterway was torn down on Saturday night by order of local authorities. The move comes as US President Donald Trump has made threats in the past few months to retake control of the canal, claiming Beijing has too much influence in its operations. In a surprising move that has been criticized by leaders in Panama and China, the mayor’s office of the locality of Arraijan ordered the demolition of the monument built in 2004 to symbolize friendship between the countries. The mayor’s office said in
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
‘TRUMP’S LONG GAME’: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that while fraud was a serious issue, the US president was politicizing it to defund programs for Minnesotans US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday said it was auditing immigration cases involving US citizens of Somalian origin to detect fraud that could lead to denaturalization, or revocation of citizenship, while also announcing a freeze of childcare funds to Minnesota and demanding an audit of some daycare centers. “Under US law, if an individual procures citizenship on a fraudulent basis, that is grounds for denaturalization,” US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Denaturalization cases are rare and can take years. About 11 cases were pursued per year between 1990 and 2017, the Immigrant Legal Resource
RSS