Swiss Experts in Brief Ramallah Trip over Arafat Probe

A Swiss laboratory team on Monday made a brief visit to the West Bank city of Ramallah to prepare for the exhumation of the late president Yasser Arafat, Palestinian sources said.

The team, along with French investigators, is expected to participate in an operation starting on November 26 to exhume Arafat's remains as part of a probe into the circumstances of his death in 2004.

Ahead of the exhumation, experts from the Institute of Radiation Physics at Switzerland's University of Lausanne made a brief visit to Ramallah, visiting the grave and meeting with Palestinian health minister Hani Abdeen and justice minister Ali Mhanna.

"A delegation from the Swiss laboratory visited Yasser Arafat's grave to examine the site," said Tawfiq Tirawi, head of the Palestinian investigative committee on Arafat's death.

He told Agence France Presse he met the team "to discuss next steps."

A Swiss diplomatic source also confirmed the brief visit, without giving further details.

Tirawi stressed that opening the grave to test Arafat's remains would only take place once in the presence of both the Swiss experts and French investigators, who are running separate probes.

Arafat died in a French military hospital near Paris on November 11, 2004 and French experts were unable to say what had killed him, with many Palestinians convinced he was poisoned by Israel.

French prosecutors opened a murder inquiry in August after Al-Jazeera television broadcast an investigation in which Swiss experts said they had found high levels of radioactive polonium on Arafat's personal effects.

The French team is due to arrive in Ramallah on November 26 to begin work on exhuming the body, Palestinian sources told AFP last month, adding that Swiss experts would arrive at the same time for an operation that could take "several weeks or a month."

Polonium is a highly toxic substance rarely found outside military and scientific circles.

It was used to kill former Russian spy turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 in London shortly after drinking tea laced with the poison.