A former Israeli official has denied suspicions thatthe country poisoned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as France began an investigation into his possible murder.
Dov Weisglass, chief of staff to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the time of Arafat’s death in 2004 and a key participant in deliberations surrounding his worsening health, said Israel had no reason to harm him.
For the last two years of Arafat’s life, Israel confined him to his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, accusing him of encouraging a violent Palestinian uprising at the time.
“Israel did not have any hand in this,” Mr Weisglass said, even while calling him “one of Israel’s worst enemies”.
“We did not physically hurt him when Arafat was in his prime ... so all the more so we had no interest in this kind of activity when he was politically sidelined,” he said.
Arafat, 75, died on November 11, 2004, in a French military hospital outside Paris of what doctors called a massive stroke.
According to French medical records, he had suffered inflammation, jaundice and a blood condition known as disseminated intravascular coagulation or DIC.
But the records were inconclusive about what brought about the DIC, which has numerous causes including infections, colitis and liver disease.
The uncertainty sparked speculation about the cause of death, including the possibility of Aids or poisoning. Many in the Arab world believe he was killed by Israel.
Arafat’s widow, Suha, filed a legal complaint in France – where she is a citizen – after a Swiss institute detected traces of a rare, lethal substance on objects belonging to the leader.
His successor, President Mahmoud Abbas, welcomed the decision and has given permission for the Swiss experts to exhume his remains and conduct an autopsy.
Officials say they are still waiting for Mrs Arafat to give the final go-ahead.
Digging up the famous
Other famous cases of people who were disinterred for political, legal or medical reasons.
• SALVADOR ALLENDE: The remains of the Chilean socialist leader, killed during the coup that overthrew him in September 1973, were disinterred in 2011 to try to find out how he died. The results confirmed the official version according to which he shot himself dead as General Augusto Pinochet’s troops attacked his presidential palace.
• SIMON BOLIVAR: In 2010 the remains of the 19th-century Latin American independence hero were removed from his tomb in Caracas at the request of Presi
dent Hugo Chavez, who wanted to ascertain whether he had been murdered. An analysis failed to reach a conclusion; officially, Bolivar died of tuberculosis.
• NICOLAE and ELENA
CEAUCESCU: The bodies of the former Romanian dictator and his wife, executed on the fall of their regime in 1989, were disinterred in July 2010 at the request of relatives who wanted to be sure of their identity.
• JUAN PERON: The remains of the Argentinian leader who died in 1974 were exhumed in 2006 at the request of a woman who claimed to be his daughter – DNA tests ruled this out.
• TSAR NICHOLAS II of Russia: In 1979, over six decades after the Tsar and most of his family had been shot by troops during the Bolshevik revolution, most of their buried remains were found by an amateur archaeologist. In 1998 the remains were formally identified and buried.
• JESSE JAMES: The remains of the notorious US outlaw, who was shot dead by a rival in Missouri in 1882, were disinterred in 1995. DNA tests proved that the remains were indeed those of James, scotching a long-standing rumour that the person killed had been someone else, as part of a plot to allow the outlaw to escape justice.
• LEE HARVEY OSWALD: The body of the man who shot US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and then himself shot dead two days later, was dug up in 1981 to check its true identity. Dental records showed that the remains were truly of Oswald and not of a Soviet look-alike, as a writer had suggested.