Arafat died of AIDS, confirms Palestinian leader

Arafat died of AIDS, confirms Palestinian leader: "A leading Palestinian “resistance” figure has confirmed what many suspected all along: Yasser Arafat died of AIDS.

In an interview with Hizballah's Al-Manar TV earlier this month, Ahmad Jibril, founder and leader of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, revealed a shocking conversation he recently had with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his staff.

Said Jibril: “When [Abbas] came to Damascus with his team, I asked them: 'What happened to the investigation into the death of [Arafat]? Is it conceivable that when [former Lebanese prime minister] Rafiq Hariri was killed, all hell broke loose, but the death of Yasser Arafat, is not investigate?”"

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There has always been speculation on how and why Arafat died.  From Wikipedia:

<blockquote>Arafat was pronounced dead at 03:30 AM UTC time on November 11 at the age of 75. The exact cause of his illness is unknown. Sheikh Taissir Tamimi, who held a vigil at his bedside described the scene as, "a very painful scene. There was blood everywhere on his face. The blood was coming from every possible place. My first reaction when I saw the scene was that I didn't understand what was going on. I closed my eyes, and I started reading from the Quran...".
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In September 2005, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that French experts could not determine the cause of Arafat's death. The paper further quoted an Israeli AIDS expert who claimed that Arafat bore all the symptoms of AIDS, a hypothesis later rejected by the New York Times. Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, a personal physician of Arafat for the past 20 years, later declared that nothing in Arafat's medical report mentioned the existence of such a disease. Another "senior Israeli physician" claimed in the Haaretz article that it was "a classic case of food poisoning", probably caused by a meal eaten four hours before he fell ill on October 12 that may have contained a toxin such as ricin rather than the standard bacterial poisoning. However, in the same week that the Haaretz report was published, the New York Times published a separate report also based on access to Arafat's medical records which claimed that it was highly unlikely that Arafat had AIDS or food poisoning. Both Haaretz and the New York Times further speculated that the cause of death may have been an infection of an unknown nature or origin.

However, rumors of Arafat's poisoning have remained popular especially in among the Arab populace, but also to an extent in the rest of the world. Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, which also follows the Hashemite kings, lamented the fact that the leader's wife Suha had refused an autopsy, which would have answered many questions in the case. Calling for the creation of an independent commission to carry out investigations concerning Arafat's suspicious death, Dr. al-Kurdi declared to Haaretz on September 9, 2005 that "any doctor would tell you that these are the symptoms of a poisoning". Al-Kurdi told the Associated Press that Arafat had the AIDS virus and that "it was given to him to cover up the poison".</blockquote>