Commander of Arafat's Presidential Guard Munir Al-Zu'bi: Arafat May Have Been Poisoned by a Laser Beam, a Handshake, or a Kiss

The following are excerpts from an interview with the commander of the Palestinian Presidential Guard, Munir Al-Zu'bi, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on August 13, 2005.

Al-Zu'bi: I rule out (poisoned food). People think that Abu Ammar (Arafat) used to get his own special plate. This was not the case. There was no such thing as a plate intended especially for Abu Ammar. We used to taste from any meant for Abu Ammar an hour or two before him. I am one of the people - and I have many colleagues - who used to open any gift for Abu Ammar and taste from it before he got it.

Interviewer: So, you rule out the possibility that Abu Ammar's food was poisoned.

Al-Zu'bi: If he was poisoned, it was by new and very sophisticated materials, and not directly. It was not direct poisoning.

Interviewer: You mean, there must have been...

Al-Zu'bi: ...either by someone who used a very advanced kind of poison and shook hands with the president, with a poisoned hand, or by someone who kissed him with some substance (on his lips). This way there are poisons that are transferred... There are sophisticated poisons that are passed this way. That is one possibility. Another is by laser beams. When Abu Ammar would walk here, the Israeli army... we were unprotected. The Beit El settlement is right over there. The Beit El base... Abu Ammar used to stand here. ...in addition, there were planes sometimes... AWACS planes...

Interviewer: Yes, but poisoning... Right, but the laser would have hit... You were with him most of the time...

Al-Zu'bi: No, a laser beam aimed at a person can hit him. I was in Paris when the president went to the hospital. Something that a French doctor explained to us stuck in my mind. He said that assuming Abu Ammar had been killed by poison, the only possibility was poisoning by laser beam, either by journalists, or a TV camera, or a certain device that transmits a laser beam. When Abu Ammar would sit in an interview, the camera would be pointed at him for fifteen minutes to half an hour. If this camera were to transmit beams it may have caused such a result. He might have been harmed this way.