RAMALLAH — Tawfik Tirawi has a difficult job. From his office in Ramallah, he intends to discover who killed Yasser Arafat. After revelations broadcast by Al Jazeera in July that Arafat may have been killed by polonium 210 poisoning — indicating a sort of slow-burn, radioactive assassination — the question of who might have been involved in such a complex killing has been both a mystery, and an urgent matter of debate amongst Palestinians. “My responsibility,” Tirawi told Egypt Independent, “is to search for the criminal.” Tirawi isn't a medical expert, and isn't qualified to pronounce whether Arafat was, in fact, killed by polonium 210, traces of which were found on the personal effects of the Palestinian leader in the month before his death. There are other hypotheses to explain Arafat's death, not necessarily on the basis of intentional killing. However, Tirawi says that he has been carrying out a number of interrogations of Palestinians in the West Bank who may have been agents or accomplices in an assassination. But his investigation began well before Al Jazeera aired its findings on 4 July this year. It commenced on 18 October 2010, with the apparent coordination of the Yasser Arafat Foundation in Ramallah, headed by Arafat's nephew Nasser al-Qudwa. Since around that time, Tirawi has been prevented by Israel from traveling outside the West Bank. On 12 July, the foundation published online what was said to be Arafat's full medical file from France, where he spent the last two weeks of his life. The file contains a letter dated December 2010 from Jordanian Doctor Abdallah al-Bashir, who was apparently retained by the Yasser Arafat Foundation, to the French medical authorities saying that the only place where measurable values were missing were in the results of toxicological tests, and asking for the numbers. The next month, the request was refused. A letter from a French medical official stated that the Arafat's file had been “archived.” There seem to have been other Palestinian efforts previously to investigate Arafat's death. Palestinian guards, cooks and others who had been cooped up with the leader in Muqata'a, Arafat's Ramallah compound, were questioned in the aftermath of Arafat's death. Tirawi's focus is on Palestinians to whom he has access, he explained in a burst of frustration, because he has no power to question anyone in Israel, or anyone in any other country. Deadly radiation The Al Jazeera investigation, broadcast on 4 July, revealed that a world-renowned laboratory associated with the University Hospital Center in the Swiss city of Lausanne had found unexplained elevated levels of polonium 210 in hairs and traces of bodily fluids on clothing worn by Arafat in his final days and weeks. The concentration of the substance indicated by the tests does not occur naturally and can only be produced by a nuclear reactor. Any polonium-based assassination would therefore be likely to require the connivance of a state with nuclear capacities. Polonium 210 undoubtedly caused the widely-reported and lingering death of Russian spy and defector Alexander Litvinenko in a London hospital in 2006, two years after Arafat's death. Authorities determined he had been poisoned in a sushi restaurant after meeting a number of Russian businessmen who have never been found. The experts told Al Jazeera that further testing would be needed on Arafat's remains — a bone would do, one suggested — to confirm the possibility that Arafat was poisoned by the isotope. Within hours, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered cooperation with any investigation. Abbas had opposed an actual autopsy in France at the time of Arafat's death. Suha, Arafat's wife, had also reportedly opposed it, but she told Al Jazeera that she was overcome with emotion at the time, and did not consider the possibility. According to an account written by two Israeli journalists in 2005, Suha refused a liver biopsy on her husband four days before his death. Arafat's body was exhumed and reburied at 2 am the day after his official burial in Ramallah under the supervision of Sheikh Taissir Tamimi, a senior Palestinian religious official, who was concerned about the non-observance of tradition in the original burial. Yet again, there was no autopsy, and no samples were taken. Suha's suspicions Shortly after the Al Jazeera investigation aired, Suha explained to the French daily Le Figaro that at the time of her husband's death, she “didn't even want to think about the possibility of poisoning — it was dangerous to make the claim without proof, [but] after the findings of the Swiss laboratory, I went into action.” Weeks after the program was aired, her Swiss lawyer indicated that he and Suha would be coming to Ramallah for the exhumation and testing, which he and, separately, a representative of the Swiss hospital that conducted the tests suggested would happen “before the end of the year.” However, the Swiss hospital's spokesperson has indicated that the Swiss lab did not want to be involved in a “politicized” effort. The Swiss have apparently been negotiating the terms of a possible mission to Ramallah for the exhumation and testing of Arafat's remains, and there has been correspondence with the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Justice. Tirawi, like many Palestinians, has indicated that he holds Israel ultimately responsible for Arafat's death — a charge that Israeli officials have indignantly denied. He said he has spoken to Suha Arafat on the phone several times since the Al Jazeera program, and said there is no impediment barring her return to the West Bank. “It's her country,” he added. On the last day of July, Suha filed a request in a court near Paris for a new judicial inquiry into her husband's death on the basis of the Al Jazeera revelations, and the request was approved on 28 August. However, because the French authorities destroyed biological samples it had taken from Arafat during his final days in 2008, it is unclear what such an inquiry would investigate. Biological samples taken in Ramallah by a team of Tunisian doctors before Arafat was medically evacuated to France have also gone missing. French authorities have said that the samples had been destroyed because Suha had not shown any interest in them. Some Palestinian officials have said they would like to see an international investigation, along the lines of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was set up to investigate the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. But the precedent is questionable and that effort has been criticized as both politicized and ineffective. Chain reaction Just as Tirawi's investigation turns inward to Palestinian society, the internecine politics of Fatah — which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — have been contaminated by accusation and counter-accusation. Traces of paranoia can be found in every faction. In some quarters, there is a suspicion that the Al Jazeera revelations are part of a plot to oust Abbas. Although Abbas' term as president of the Palestinian Authority has arguably expired, he continues to hold that office until elections that he himself must call for. Such suspicions were stoked by the perception that the Al Jazeera program was intended to lay responsibility at the feet of Abbas. At one point in the program, the narrator states that at the time of Arafat's death, “regime change is exactly what Washington and Tel Aviv had in mind.” This is superimposed over archival footage of Abbas speaking to the Palestinian Authority's Legislative Council. The program also included archival audio of Suha Arafat calling Al Jazeera and saying, live on air, in a strident tone bordering on hysteria, “Let the honest Palestinian people know that a bunch of those who want to inherit are coming to Paris. You have to realize the size of the conspiracy. I tell you, they are trying to bury Abu Ammar (Arafat) alive.” This audio is superimposed over footage of Abbas, former Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei, and former Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat being received soon afterwards at the Elysee Palace by France's then-President Jacques Chirac. But even before the Al Jazeera report, there were accusations by Arafat's close associate Farouq Qaddoumi on the eve of the 2009 Fatah General Conference, which prompted some sort of non-public investigation. The conference returned Abbas to power. Also elected, however, was Mohamed Dahlan, a former Fatah strongman in Gaza, who now appears to be in open war with Abbas, and who faces charges in Ramallah, otherwise unspecified, of “murder.” Even once Arafat's body is exhumed, and long after samples are taken and tested, it is likely that questions and recriminations on this subject will continue. This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.
