France Launches Murder Investigation Into Yasser Arafat’s Death

French prosecutors have announced the start of a major investigation of the death of Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat who died in 2004. The investigation will be taken on by authorities who have the power to summons and question witnesses. Recent allegations of foul play surfaced when French doctors said they could not establish the cause of death. The Swiss Radiophysics Institute said it found a surprisingly high level of plutonium 210 on Arafat’s clothing the same substance used to kill the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. The Palestinean authority agreed last week to a request from Suha Arafat who lives in malta to exhume her husband’s body from a limestone mausoleum in the West Bank city of Ramallah for an autopsy. Confined by Israel to his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah for three years after a Palestinian uprising occurred, an ailing Arafat collapsed in October 2004. He was airlifted to France where he fell into a coma and died in November 2004.