A former aide to Yasser Arafat said Wednesday that he believed an Israeli assassin killed the Palestinian leader by blowing a slow-acting poison into his ear.
Ahmed Abdel Rahman, who worked closely with Arafat, did not offer evidence to back his accusations, and Israeli officials dismissed them as slander.
"It was easy to poison him in the ear, because he was under siege and he used to receive a lot of people and he used to hug them to kiss them and my assumption is that the perpetrator carried a small balloon of gas and he could blow it in Arafat's ear," he said.
Arafat was 75 when he died in a French military hospital Nov. 11, 2004. The medical report was inconclusive and the cause of his death remains shrouded in mystery, fueling rumors among Palestinians that he was poisoned and among Israelis that he died of AIDS.
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