Samples were taken from Arafat's body last year by Swiss,
French and Russian forensics experts after an al Jazeera
documentary said his clothes showed high amounts of deadly
polonium 210.
The Swiss said last month their tests were consistent with
polonium poisoning but not absolute proof of the cause of death.
The Russian finding was in line with that of French scientists
who said earlier this month that Arafat had not been killed with
polonium.
"Yasser Arafat died not from the effects of radiation but of
natural causes," Vladimir Uiba, head of Russia's state forensics
body, the Federal Medico-Biological Agency, was quoted as saying
by the Interfax news agency.
Arafat, who signed the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords with
Israel but then led an uprising in 2000, died at 75 at the Percy
hospital in Paris in 2004, four weeks after falling ill in his
Ramallah compound, which was surrounded by Israeli tanks.
"Like the French report on his death, this is a politicized
finding. The truth lies at the Percy hospital," Wasel Abu
Yousef, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation
Organisation, told Reuters.
The official cause of death was a stroke, but French doctors
said at the time they were unable to determine the origin of
Arafat's illness. No autopsy was carried out.
His widow, Suha Arafat, has argued the death was a political
assassination by someone close to her husband. Many Palestinians
believe Israel killed him — a charge Israel denies.
The Palestinian ambassador to Moscow, Faed Mustafa, said the
Russian findings would not halt efforts to investigate the cause
of death, state-run Russian news agency RIA reported.
"I can only say that there is already a decision to continue
(investigating)," RIA quoted him as saying. "We respect their
position and we highly value their work, but there is a decision
to continue work."
(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; editing by
Andrew Roche)
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