RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories (AFP) - The Palestinians are seeking an international probe into Yasser Arafat's death to finally ''close the file'' on his mysterious death, their foreign minister said on Thursday.
The demand was backed by Tunisia, which called for an urgent meeting of the Arab League and the formation of an international commission of inquiry.
''We are waiting for this Tunisian initiative to be translated into action and for the meeting to be held,'' foreign minister Riyad al-Malki told the official Voice of Palestine radio.
''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,'' he said.
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, a highly radioactive material rarely found outside military and scientific circles.
Also known as Radium F, it is a rare but naturally occurring metalloid found in uranium ores that emits highly hazardous alpha, or positively charged, particles.
Before being cited this week in connection with Arafat's death, the substance had been named in the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy and dissident who died in a London hospital in 2006 showing symptoms of polonium poisoning.
Small doses of polonium 210 exist in the soil and atmosphere, and even in the human body, but in high doses it is highly toxic if it is ingested or inhaled, and can damage the body's tissues and organs.
It is one of the rarest natural elements: in 10 grams of uranium there is a maximum of a billionth of a gram of polonium.
The substance has been used industrially for its alpha radiation in research and medicine, and as a heating source for space components, but in those forms it is not conducive to easy poisoning.
Small doses are also found in tobacco, derived from the soil and phosphate fertilizers used on tobacco plants.
Polonium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 while they were doing research in France on the cause of radioactivity in the mineral pitchblende, the chief ore-mineral source of uranium.
After Al-Jazeera television broadcast the probe result, 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.
In Tunisia, Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem said: ''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.
''We owe a debt to that great man, who had such an influence on the Palestinian national cause.''
Tunis hosted the Palestine Liberation Organisation, of which Arafat was the chairman, after it was expelled from Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion until the 1994 launch of Palestinian autonomy.
The Institute of Radiation Physics at the University of Lausanne tested items belonging to Arafat at Al-Jazeera's request, including clothing worn by him, which were handed to his widow Suha by the Paris hospital where he died in November 2004 at the age of 75.
Suha Arafat gave Al-Jazeera permission to take the items, which contained strands of Arafat's hair and traces of sweat, urine and blood, for testing at several European laboratories, including the Switzerland institute, which reported finding high levels of polonium.
Polonium, A Highly Radioactive Material
Polonium, the poison suspected of being used to kill the Palestinian Leaderin 2004, is a highly radioactive material rarely found outside military and scientific circles.
Also known as Radium F, it is a rare but naturally occurring metalloid found in uranium ores that emits highly hazardous alpha, or positively charged, particles.
Before being cited this week in connection with Arafat's death, the substance had been named in the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy and dissident who died in a London hospital in 2006 showing symptoms of polonium poisoning.
Small doses of polonium 210 exist in the soil and atmosphere, and even in the human body, but in high doses it is highly toxic if it is ingested or inhaled, and can damage the body's tissues and organs.
It is one of the rarest natural elements: in 10 grams of uranium there is a maximum of a billionth of a gram of polonium.
The substance has been used industrially for its alpha radiation in research and medicine, and as a heating source for space components, but in those forms it is not conducive to easy poisoning.
Small doses are also found in tobacco, derived from the soil and phosphate fertilizers used on tobacco plants.
Polonium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 while they were doing research in France on the cause of radioactivity in the mineral pitchblende, the chief ore-mineral source of uranium.
Marie Curie named the material after her homeland of Poland, which at the time was under Russian, Prussian and Austrian control and not recognised as an independent country.
For their discovery of polonium, radium and their work on radioactivity, the Curies won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, which they shared with Antoine Becquerel of France.
Like many other pioneering researchers in the field of radioactivity, Marie Curie died in 1934 at the age 67 of leukaemia, brought on by her handling radioactive materials.
