Swiss forensic tests on samples taken from the late Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat's remains have shown unexpectedly high levels of radioactive polonium-210.  The findings support the theory that Arafat was murdered, poisoned with the rare and lethal substance.  His widow Suha Arafat calls it, “The crime of the century.”

Arafat was 75 years old in 2004, when he fell ill after a meal and died four weeks later in a French military hospital.  The official medical records say he died from a stroke resulting from a blood disorder.  The new findings throw that into doubt.

In early 2012, a reporter from the al Jazeera news network gave a bag of Arafat’s personal effects from a bag he took with him to that hospital to scientists at the University of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland.  The institute found “an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210”.  That led to Yassir Arafat’s remains being exhumed in November, 2012, and samples were collected.

“The report contains strong evidence, in my view conclusive evidence, that there's at least 18 times the level of polonium in Arafat's exhumed body than there should be,” said David Barclay, a British forensic scientist who had studied the report.

Without directly implicating Israel, Suha Arafat suspects a “conspiracy” to get rid of Arafat.

“My daughter and I have to know who did it. We will not stop in our quest to find out,” she said, “I hope the Palestinian Authority goes further on it, searching every single aspect of it. It is of course a political crime.”

Polonium-210 also figured in the murder of prominent Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.  After publishing books linking Russian organized crime to the rise of Vladimir Putin and implicating Putin in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Litvinenko ate some sushi that was tainted with the radioactive poison.  Within days, he was hospitalized, unable to walk and bald from total hair loss.