A Palestinian call for an international probe into Yasser Arafat’s death won official backing from Tunisia on Thursday, after a report showed the leader may have been poisoned.
Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki told the official Voice of Palestine radio on Thursday that such an enquiry could finally “close the file” on Arafat’s mysterious death.
And Tunisia called for the Arab League to convene.
“We call for an urgent meeting of Arab League foreign ministers and the creation of an international committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death” of Arafat, Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem told private radio station Mosaique FM.
“We are waiting for this Tunisian initiative to be translated into action and for the meeting to be held,” Malki said.
“Then we will ask for an international investigation committee to be formed similar to the one formed into the assassination of (Lebanese Prime Minister) Rafiq Hariri so we can solve so many of the unanswered questions,” he added.
“We want to show that the PA (Palestinian Authority) leadership and people are all anxious to know all the details surrounding Arafat’s death, so we can close this file.”
On Tuesday, Al-Jazeera television broadcast the results of a nine-month probe it commissioned into the 2004 death of the iconic Palestinian leader that indicated he could have been poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium.
The next day Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas endorsed exhuming Arafat’s body from its mausoleum at the Palestinian presidency headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah for a forensic examination.
The supreme Palestinian Islamic authority, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Hussein, said there was no religious law forbidding Arafat’s exhumation.
“If it is necessary to examine a body for the needs of an inquiry and that requires its full or partial retrieval there is nothing to prevent that,” he told AFP on Thursday.
we waiting to know the truth @
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