The widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said Swiss forensic tests on her husband's corpse show he was poisoned to death with radioactive polonium in 2004, Reuters reported.
"We are revealing a real crime, a political assassination," Suha Arafat told Reuters on Wednesday.
After an investigation by Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel reported traces of polonium-210 in Arafat's personal belongings that were given to his widow by the French military hospital where he died. French prosecutors opened a murder investigation in August of 2012 at the request of Suha, Reuters reported.
After Palestinian Authority agreed to have Arafat's grave opened, forensic experts from Switzerland, Russia and France took samples from his corpse. Experts opened the deceased president's grave in the West Bank city of Ramallah last November and retrieved sample fluids from his body, evidence of poisoning surfaced, according to Reuters.
After meeting with the Swiss forensic team in Geneva on Tuesday, Suha said all the doubts about Arafat's death have been confirmed, Reuters reported.
Though Suha did not accuse any one person or country, she told Reuters "it is scientifically proved that he didn't die a natural death and we have scientific proof that this man was killed," adding the leader had many enemies.
Arafat, who signed the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords with Israel and later led an uprising after the failure of talks in 2000, had enemies among his own people, but fingers were immediately pointed at Israel, according to Reuters.
After his death, allegations of foul play surfaced immediately towards Israel because their military forces surrounded Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters for the last two years of his life, according to Reuters. The Israeli government denied any role in his death.
Neither France nor Russia have confirmed any findings publicly, or with Suha's legal team, according to Reuters. According to Suha's lawyers, the Swiss report will be translated from English to French and will be given to three magistrates in Paris who are investigating the case.
"In my opinion, it is absolutely certain that the cause of his illness was polonium poisoning," professor David Barclay, a British forensic scientist, who was used by Al Jazeera to interpret the Swiss forensic report, told Reuters. "The levels present in him are sufficient to have caused death."
