Russia to help probe Yasser Arafat's death, Palestinian president says
Source: Guardian
Russia will join an international investigation to determine whether the first Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, was murdered, the current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said on Sunday.
French and Swiss experts are due to exhume Arafat's body in Ramallah later this month in an attempt to discover how he died after an al-Jazeera documentary in July suggested he was killed by a rare radioactive poison.
"There's full cooperation these days between us and the French investigators and Swiss experts, and also from the Russian government," Abbas told a ceremony on the eighth anniversary of the death in France of the former guerrilla who led Palestinians' campaign to create a state through years of war and peace.
Abbas asked Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov for Moscow's help during talks in Jordan last week, Palestinian sources said.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/11/russia-yasser-arafat-death-palestinian