Who killed Arafat?

Stuff reports:

Yasser Arafat’s widow first cried murder as her husband lay dying in 2004. Nine years later, she has raised her voice once more, accusing someone from the Palestinian leader’s own inner circle of poisoning him.

The allegation, fuelled by the findings of Swiss forensic experts, has been met by stony silence from Arafat’s political heirs, who have long maintained that Israel was responsible for the mysterious illness that killed the Palestinian president.

Suha Arafat’s charge, broadcast around the Arab world, has reawakened old controversies in the Palestinian Authority, which always viewed his widow – a French-educated Christian convert to Islam who was 34 years his junior – as a liability.

I tend to agree with Mrs Arafat that this was probably an inside job. Israel had nothing to gain from killing Arafat at that late stage of his life. They’d be a more logical suspect if it had happened 20 years earlier.

Maybe the over one billion dollars in embezzled funds was a motive?

It is not certain he was poisoned. As I understand it, the evidence is consistent with poisoning, but not conclusive.