"The objective is to find out whether or not his body has been exposed to polonium 210," Francois Bochud, director of the Institute for Radiation Physics at Switzerland's University of Lausanne, said in an interview appearing on Sunday in Le Matin Dimanche.

The veteran leader died at the age of 75 in a French military hospital near Paris on November 11th 2004.

French experts were unable to say what had killed him, but many Palestinians convinced he was poisoned by Israel.

French prosecutors launched a probe after Al-Jazeera television broadcast an investigation in which the Swiss experts said they had found high levels of polonium, a highly toxic radioactive substance, on Arafat's personal effects.

Bochud and Patrice Mangin, a forensic pathologist and toxicologist, will join the operation to examine Arafat's remains that is expected to begin on November 26th.

"Frankly, I don't know what we are going to find," Bochud said.

Polonium, which is rarely found outside military and scientific circles, was used to kill former Russian spy turned Kremlin critic Alexander
Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the poison at a London hotel.