The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned with radioactive polonium, says a Swiss forensic report obtained by al-Jazeera. Arafat’s official medical records say he died in 2004 from a stroke resulting from a blood disorder. But his body was exhumed last year amid continuing claims he was murdered. The Swiss report said tests on the body showed “unexpected high activity” of polonium, which “moderately” supported the poisoning theory. Many Palestinians have long believed that Israel poisoned Arafat. There have also been allegations that he had Aids or cancer. Israel has consistently denied any involvement. A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry said the Swiss investigation was “more soap opera than science”.
It is nearly 30 years since my aunt, Hilda Murrell, was abducted, beaten, stabbed and left to die in a copse in the countryside outside Shrewsbury. Her murder has become a cause celebre, not just because of the shocking manner of her death, but because of the unanswered questions that refuse to go away. Hilda, a 78-year-old rose-grower and anti-nuclear environmentalist, was a keeper of dangerous secrets. Involved in top-secret work at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, she was an independent, well-connected and informed opponent of Britain’s plans for nuclear power and weapons. Because of her close association with me, she was suspected of having sensitive information about the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano in the 1982 Falklands War. Someone wanted her silenced for this, or was it for even more politically damaging information?
The past three decades have seen a rising tide of evidence that the true perpetrators were the British security services. Meanwhile a man is languishing in jail, wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit. Hilda was my close friend and mentor and I was her next of kin. I was a commander in Royal Navy Intelligence at the heart of the Falklands War, thus I fear it is more than possible that having me as her nephew sealed her fate. – ‘They’ve rubbed her out.’ It was my immediate thought, an involuntary conviction. At 2pm on Saturday, March 24, 1984, West Mercia Police rang to say they had found an old woman’s body. Hilda had been missing since the Wednesday. Her mutilated corpse had been discovered in a poplar copse six miles outside Shrewsbury, some 500 yards from her crashed Renault 5.
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