Around 60 samples were taken from the remains of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a probe into whether he was poisoned by polonium, a Swiss newspaper reported Sunday, quoting a lead investigator.
The samples were distributed among three teams doing separate analyses eight years after Arafat's death in a French hospital, Patrice Mangin told Le Matin Dimanche.
A Palestinian pathologist was the only person allowed to touch the body when Arafat's grave was opened on Tuesday in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
He was able to "take all the samples that were wanted, around 60 in total," said Mangin, the director of the Swiss University Center of Legal Medicine in Lausanne.
OK, that's the second irregularity around this investigation. The first one was why are Russians involved in the investigation, together with the Swiss (who did the initial testing on Arafat's personal items) and the French (since Arafat died in Paris.) What do the Russians have to do with it - except for the fact that they happen to live where polonium is most available?
Is it possible that the Russians instructed the Arab pathologist how he could brush trace amounts of polonium on Arafat's tissue samples before he gave them to the team? (Could the same have happened with Suha, which would explain why such abnormally large amounts of polonium were found - amounts that would have indicated Arafat had ingested enough to have been killed within hours, not weeks?)
I can see no valid reason to stop the Swiss and French from taking the tissue samples directly. the unfortunate fact is that any Palestinian Arab involved in the investigation is automatically suspect - because the PLO has publicly called Arafat's death a "murder" for years.