Russia Claims Former Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat Died Of Natural Causes, Not Radiation Poisoning

Russia claimed that former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died of natural causes, not radiation poisoning, Reuters reported.

The investigation would carry on, said a Palestinian official on Thursday who called the finding "politicized".

Forensic experts from Switzerland, France and Russia took samples from Arafat's body last year after an Al Jazeera documentary hinted that his clothes showed high amounts of deadly polonium 210, Reuters reported.

Although the polonium poisoning was consistent with the Al Jazeera tests, they couldn't be taken as absolute proof of the cause of death, the Swiss said last month.

"Yasser Arafat died not from the effects of radiation but of natural causes," Vladimir Uiba, head of Russia's state forensics body, the Federal Medico-Biological Agency, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Arafat, who signed the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords with Israel but then led an uprising in 2000, died at 75 at the Percy hospital in Paris in 2004, four weeks after falling ill in his Ramallah compound, which was surrounded by Israeli tanks, Reuters reported.

"Like the French report on his death, this is a politicized finding," Wasel Abu Yousef, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told Reuters. "The truth lies at the Percy hospital."

Even though a stroke was claimed to be the official cause of Arafat's death, French doctors were unable to determine the origin of Arafat's illness at that time. No autopsy was carried out.

His widow, Suha Arafat, has argued the death was a political assassination by someone close to her husband. Many Palestinians believe Israel killed him - a charge Israel denies, according to Reuters.

The Palestinian ambassador to Moscow, Faed Mustafa, said the Russian findings would not halt efforts to investigate the cause of death, state-run Russian news agency RIA reported.

"I can only say that there is already a decision to continue (investigating)," Mustafa told RIA. "We respect their position and we highly value their work, but there is a decision to continue work."

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