Yasser Arafat may have had HIV

August 15, 2007

Reports are surfacing that say former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, present in his blood stream when he died. A number of reports say the virus had been injected to him prior to death and the actual cause of death was a separately administered poison that HIV was intended to mask.

The claims come from Doctor Ashraf al-Kurdi, a former doctor for Arafat and former member of the Health Ministry located in Jordan, who says the virus was injected into Arafat's blood stream just before his death; but al-Kurdi also stated that Arafat's death was not caused by the virus. Doctor Ashraf al-Kurdi also states that Arafat's wife prevented him from attending to Arafat while he was dying.

CNSNews.com claims that Arafat may have been a homosexual and that syphilis was the cause of his death. CNSNews.com also claims that Israel caused his death by poisoning him.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, an ex-head of Romanian intelligence, and Terry McAuliffe, an aide to Bill Clinton, have unrelated claims that Arafat was homosexual.

It has been alleged that the PLO's leader may have contracted HIV as the result of risky homosexual behavior in the years preceding the AIDS scare of the late 1980s. Arafat's sexual proclivities may have been largely ignored by Arab, and indeed other, state leaders.

Arafat died on November 11, 2004 at Percy hospital in Paris. French officials never fully explained the cause of death, but instead transferred his medical records to his nephew Nasser al-Qudwa, his next of kin.