Russia will join an international investigation to determine whether
the first Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, was murdered, the
current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said on Sunday, the
Guardian writes.
"The case returned to the headlines in July when a Swiss institute
said it had discovered high levels of the radioactive element
polonium-210 on Arafat's clothing supplied by his widow Suha, who
called for exhumation of her husband's body. Polonium is the
radioactive substance found to have killed former Russian spy
Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006," the article reads.
Abbas asked Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov for Moscow's help
during talks in Jordan last week.
Arafat's direct kin have rejected an exhumation. "We say openly that
our leader, our founder was assassinated by Israel with poison. The
overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people is convinced of this,"
the Guardian cites Nasser al-Kidwa, Arafat's nephew and a senior
official in Abbas's Fatah group.
