Category Archives: Mossad

Can the US afford not to help in the Dubai murder investigation?

On Thursday, the US State Department spokesmen P J Crowley was called on to break the US silence regarding the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh:

QUESTION: …has there been any comment on the apparent assassination in Dubai? Is that something the U.S. has weighed in on?

MR. CROWLEY: I don’t think we’ve weighed in on it. It is being investigated by Dubai authorities.

QUESTION: Are you concerned about what appears to have been the use of foreign passports, forged passports by foreign operatives?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, I think, as a – you probably – the best place to – well – I mean, we have taken steps in recent years to strengthen the security surrounding U.S. passports. Obviously, this has been an area where the United States has talked to other countries. We are very alert to attempts to use forged or stolen passports, and as a major effort to limit the travel of terrorists around the world. So it is something that we have spent a lot of time focused on.

As to – I mean, that obviously is an area that will be investigated and is being investigated by Dubai authorities.

QUESTION: Would you be – would you condemn the use by an intelligence agency of forging passports?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, there’s an assumption behind your question that I can’t address.

QUESTION: Have the Dubai authorities, or the European partners, allies, asked the United States for help in the investigation into —

MR. CROWLEY: Not to my knowledge.

QUESTION: And would you cooperate with Interpol on any of this?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, we – I mean, we have specific responsibilities to – law enforcement would be cooperative if there’s anything that we can do or if we come across any information that we think is useful to the investigation.

Maybe Dubai can set up an 800 number — a number US officials can call if they happen to stumble across any useful information. Crowley’s response did not suggest the US intends to stonewall the Dubai investigation, but the tone was one of calculated disinterest.

But wait. The Wall Street Journal now reports:

American and United Arab Emirates authorities are exchanging information on a handful of credit-card accounts, issued through two U.S. firms, that Dubai police say were used by suspects in the killing of a top Hamas official in Dubai, according to a person familiar with the situation.

For years, U.S. government officials have flown into the U.A.E. and other Persian Gulf states, asking for assistance in terror-financing probes. The investigation of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s death appears to be the highest-profile case in which the roles are reversed: The U.A.E. is turning to Washington in its efforts to track down suspected criminal financing through the U.S. banking system.

What the WSJ neglects to mention is that Dubai’s call for US assistance comes at particularly awkward moment.

As the US pushes for sanctions against Iran, the emirate of Dubai is in a pivotal position to tighten or ease the economic pressure — it functions as Iran’s most important commercial and financial connection with the rest of the world.

If Washington drags its feet in assisting Dubai now, why should the US expect help from Dubai on the larger issue of pressuring Iran — an issue that concerns Israel more than any other country?

At the same time, if the Associated Press is to be believed, Dubai is not getting much help from European governments in the investigation:

The spotlight is falling on those countries where police say the alleged assassins’ trails begin and end: Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Authorities there have either declined to say whether they are investigating, or told The Associated Press they have no reason to hunt down the 26 suspects implicated in the Jan. 19 killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

European countries’ reluctance to investigate may have something to do with the widely held belief that the killing of al-Mabhouh was carried out by a friendly country’s intelligence agency – Israel’s Mossad. The Jewish state has previously identified him as the point man for smuggling weapons to the Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers.

Experts say arresting Israeli agents – or even digging up further evidence that Israel was involved – could be politically costly.

And what exactly would that political cost be? Israel might refuse to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest? Israel leaders might decline to visit European countries where they already face the risk of being arrested for war crimes?

Certainly, the arrest of Mossad agents by a European country might sour relations with the US, but what’s the US going to do? Kick NATO troops out of Afghanistan?

As far as I can see, we’re looking at a political balance sheet where all the loses are on Israel’s side.

But we scored a major victory against Hamas, Israelis say.

Let’s be honest. The future of the Palestinian national movement, of which Hamas is a part, did not depend on Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The Islamist organization and his family no doubt mourn his loss, but he is replaceable.

Meanwhile, the Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim made a move that will not sit well with dual national Israelis and non-Israeli Jews who conduct business in the region. He urged Arab countries to thoroughly check any Jew who carries a non-Israeli passport in order to “prevent Mossad’s infiltrations”.

You might call it profiling payback.

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Mossad tries to restore its images

Even among Israelis who welcomed news of the assassination of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, there must have been growing disquiet that the faces of so many Mossad operatives would have since become so widely known. So much exposure for a clandestine operation has to be bad, doesn’t it?

It now appears that Mossad has enrolled the services of Haaretz in order to do some damage control.

The Israeli newspaper reports:

The passport photographs of the agents who assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai were doctored so the agents would not be identified, a Haaretz probe has discovered.

The discovery casts doubt on claims that the espionage agency that carried out last month’s hit on the senior Hamas operative committed grave errors.

Various features of the people in the photographs, such as eye color or the line of a lip, were changed – slightly enough so as not arouse suspicion at passport control, but still enough that the real agent could not be recognized.

According to the Dubai police, only a few of the agents were caught on security cameras without their disguises. However, it had been assumed until now that publication of the photos of the 26 agents had blown their cover. Now it appears that the Dubai police still do not have viable information about their real appearance.

In an era where investigative journalism has largely become a thing of the past, it’s hard not to scoff when one reads that a newspaper has conducted a “probe”. Some intrepid reporters dug deep and pulled out the truth and now they can proudly display their discovery.

In this case, I would counter that there is more to be discovered by reasoning than revelation.

I’ll start with this — a wild piece of conjecture in which I have absolute confidence: the “espionage agency” that Haaretz stuck its probe into was Mossad — no other spy shop would dole out sensitive information to Israeli reporters.

Secondly, the idea that Haaretz actually discovered that there were discrepancies between the appearances of the Mossad agents and the images on their passports is absurd. (I don’t care how careful an analysis of the CCTV images might be it ain’t going to pick up differences in eye color and the like.) Such discrepancies may exist in reality, but there seem to be only two ways Haaretz could know about them. Either, in a friendly meeting with a Mossad officer the newspaper was shown two sets of photographs: one being the ones used in the passports and the other showing the undoctored appearances of the operatives — but I have my doubts that Mossad would be that candid. Much more likely was a friendly phone call from a trusted source inside the agency, saying: you know those photos of all our guys plastered over all the newspapers? We doctored them. Our guys are safe. No one will be able to recognize them. The intrepid Haaretz reporters would not have been so impertinent as to ask for some proof.

In sum, what we can reliably infer from this report is that Mossad is busy working the media. Its cover may or may not have been blown but at the very least it wants to reassure concerned Israelis that the much praised and feared agency remains rock solid.

Meanwhile, while one thrust of Mossad’s PR drive is pushing the message that its operatives identities are well protected, another thrust is actually promoting their images — as “young, pretty and dangerous“. The message: assassination is sexy and it doesn’t have to interfere with an Israeli woman’s plans to start a family. “Rumors that women are used by the Mossad mostly as [sexual] bait are greatly exaggerated,” Ynet reassures its readers.

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The Dubai-Payoneer connection

As I noted below, the New York-based company Payoneer is linked to Israel in a number of ways, not least through it’s Israeli CEO, Yuval Tal, a former member of an elite combat unit of the Israel Defense Forces and former Vice President of Business Development for the Tel Aviv-based technology company, Radware. Tal describes how Payoneer operates in this video.

As Clayton Swisher notes:

Mr Tal did not exactly conceal his prior affiliations when he appeared on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war. He opined then that “this is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose”.

If Tal or his Payoneer firm are in any way involved in the conspiracy to help a foreign intelligence service (like, say providing Mossad operatives with credit cards), he may soon find himself in his own battle with little prospects of winning – in a US courtroom.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency with statutory authority and responsibilities for investigating foreign espionage activities on US soil. It’s a job they take seriously and with a proven record of not shying away from the numerous instances when America’s special ally played foul.

As an initial inquiry, I imagine case agents will subpoena all financial records associated with the fraudulently issued credit cards. This would include the original credit card applications, which requires such things as a delivery address (to mail the card to), social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information.

If the applications were made on paper, then the documents may contain all manner of evidence, from handwriting samples to fingerprints. There will be a similar trail to pore over if the applications were made over the phone or electronically via computer.

I also smell money laundering, as the money was supposedly dumped into prepaid accounts to conceal its purpose and origination. So US investigators may even want to tap in on the US treasury department’s crack financial investigator, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN).

Beneath an article about Payoneer appearing at TechCrunch, a commenter suggests: “payoneer is definitely in the legal gray area when it comes to the patriot’s act, anti-money laundering, and a host of other laws around ‘know your customer'”
Tal answers:

Payoneer is meticulously compliant with all federal, state and MasterCard regulations, including AML, BSA, Patriot act, KYC etc. There is nothing grey about it. As a certified MasterCard Member Service Provider we undergo rigorous ongoing diligence related, among others, to our regulatory compliance level.

If Payoneer comes under investigation, the FBI and US government regulatory agencies will not simply take Tal at his word. They will want to know exactly how Payoneer cards could be used by individuals with false identification.

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Dubai money trail leads back to Israel

Although the Israeli government has yet to confirm its role in the murder of Mahmoud al Mabhouh, the Dubai police have provided further evidence through financial records that connect the crime to Israel.

The company Payoneer Inc., based in New York, has been named in the case – a company that helps facilitate Taglit-Birthright Israel trips. Payoneer provides financial services for trip participants and as the Wall Street Journal reports, the company’s chief executive, Yuval Tal, is a former Israeli special-forces soldier.

Dubai police said Wednesday they had identified credit cards used by 14 of the suspects to book hotel rooms and pay for air travel. Police named the issuing bank as MetaBank, a unit of Meta Financial Group Inc., a financial company based in Storm Lake, Iowa.

The bank said it had no comment “because we are trying to confirm the accuracy of statements by the press.”

Dubai police identified cards issued by Britain’s Nationwide Building Society, IDT Finance of Gilbraltar, and Germany’s DZ Bank AG. A Nationwide spokesman told the Associated Press that bank officials were “investigating the reports and have no further comments.” The other European companies weren’t reachable late Wednesday.

Dubai also identified a company called Payoneer Inc., based in New York, though it wasn’t clear what precise role authorities believe that company played. In a chart released to reporters, authorities suggested the company distributed the cards on behalf of MetaBank.

According to its Web site, Payoneer offers online payment solutions, including arranging for employers to pay overseas workers through money transfers into prepaid MasterCard debit-card accounts. Payoneer is based in New York, but has offices in Tel Aviv.

The company’s chief executive, Yuval Tal, appeared as a commentator on the Lebanon war in 2006 on Fox News, identifying himself as a former Israeli special-forces soldier. Mr. Tal wasn’t available to comment.

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Dubai police name new suspects in Hamas murder

Gulf News reports:

Police revealed 15 more suspects in the Al Mabhouh murder case on Wednesday. The extensive investigation has led to a total of 26 suspects so far involved in the murder of the Hamas official Mahmoud Al Mabhouh at a Dubai hotel. In addition to the previously released list of 11 suspects, Dubai Police has now identified another six suspects, who include a woman who used British passports, a man and three women travelling on Irish passports, two men who used French passports, and three people with Australian passports. The Australians included a woman.


Newly-released video of some of the murder suspects:

With the travel movements and photographs of 26 suspected Mossad operatives now appearing in the international media, how long will it be before one of the murder suspects is arrested? Moreover, since Mossad’s assassination unit apparently included around just 50 agents, one would imagine that with half of them now in hiding (or getting reconstructive plastic surgery to change their appearances) the unit has, for the time being, rendered itself inoperative.

Meanwhile, The Independent reports:

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday flatly rebuffed David Miliband’s request for cooperation with an investigation into the use of forged British passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader.

The request for assistance came as the total number of fake British passports believed to have been used in last month’s assassination rose from six to eight. But private discussions on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Brussels – and an identical request from Irish foreign minister Micheál Martin – yielded no concessions on the Israeli side.

A statement from Mr Lieberman’s office reiterated that there was “no proof” of Israeli involvement in the affair. “If someone would present information beyond articles in the media, we would relate to it,” he is said to have told Mr Miliband. “But since there is no such information, there is no need to deal with the matter.”

A report in the Los Angeles Times, recounting an interview that an Israeli journalist, Ronen Bergman, gave on Israeli Army Radio on Monday, indicates that Mossad has been amazingly slow in covering its tracks:

A man walked in to the interior ministry in Cologne, Germany on June 16, 2009, and claimed that he was Michael Bodenheimer, an Israeli citizen, descended of a German family that had been persecuted by the Nazis.

He applied for German citizenship, saying he wished to leave Israel and emigrate to Germany. He presented documents, including his parents’ German marriage certificate, said he lived in the community of Liman and also gave an address in Herzliya.

The documents must have been convincingly authentic, and two days later, in a model of bureaucratic efficiency that seems atypical (even for Germany), the passport had been issued.

The photograph on the passport is the one now in the papers as one of the assassins, but it is most definitely not that of the Michael Bodenheimer who does live somewhere else in Israel.

The Israeli one is a yeshiva master, an ultraorthodox Jew living in Bnei Brak. His parents were, in fact, born in Frankfurt, Germany, but that’s where the similarity ends. He has Israeli citizenship and evidently American too, but not German.

The new Bodenheimer gave an address in Herzliya. Bergman said the German authorities didn’t check it out. But had they done so, they would have found that he had an apparent shell company in his name with offices in Herzliya.

“Michael Bodenheimer Ltd.” belonged to a group of offices opened by a different company called “Top Office” located on the same floor.

Top Office, says Bergman, is apparently a company that provides individuals and small businesses with an office and secretary at a respectable location.

Bergman said he paid the business address a visit on Friday night, together with the Der Spiegel correspondent in Israel, he told the radio.

He took a picture of the sign saying “Michael Bodenheimer Ltd,” and called the number for Top Office. An American-accented woman answered, sounded very surprised and hung up after saying she didn’t work on the Sabbath.

By Sunday morning, says Bergman, both companies were gone. The signs had been removed.

And the guard — the same one from Friday night — was awfully jittery and tried to shoo them away.

Finally, The Guardian reports on a British man whose identity was stolen by Mossad decades ago:

The infamous 1979 assassination of the Palestinian who masterminded the Munich massacre was carried out using a forged British passport belonging to a 27-year-old council worker living in a small flat in south London, the Guardian can reveal.

Peter Derbyshire, who at the time was running leisure centres for Lambeth council, found himself being questioned by special branch over the assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of operations for Black September, the terrorist organisation behind the hostage attack at the 1972 Olympics that resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes.

Derbyshire, who now runs a travel company in the French Pyrenees, told the Guardian: “I received a call at work from someone who said: ‘I’m from ­special branch. I’m inside your apartment. Can you come home?'”

He returned to find his flat in Balham, south London, had been turned upside down by two special branch officers. He was interrogated for hours by the police, who asked detailed questions about his history and political affiliations.

Eventually they told him his passport number had been used by a man named Peter Scriver in the murder of Salameh in Beirut.

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Israel cruises into a diplomatic storm

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, speaking on Saturday, suggested that Israel will not face a diplomatic crisis with Europe over the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai “because there is nothing linking Israel to the assassination.”

“Britain, France and Germany are countries with shared interests with Israel in countering terrorism,” Ayalon said.

Not so fast. The latest information indicates that a diplomatic crisis is near unavoidable.

Israel is now directly implicated in the killing as British diplomatic sources have been told that Israeli immigration officials at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, secretly copied the British passports which were then used by the Mossad assassins.

But if stealing the identities was not enough, Dubai police now say that some of the killers were carrying diplomatic passports.

Israel has questions to answer and the dismissive responses it has given so far will not satisfy European governments that are fast running out of patience.

Meanwhile, Victor Ostrovsky, a former colonel in Mossad, advised the Israeli residents whose identities were stolen that their lives are at risk.

“They’re safe so to speak, until somebody kills them. I would tell them: do not travel outside the country for at least two years, under any circumstances,” he said.

In the Daily Telegraph, Alasdair Palmer notes that judging by the international reaction to the killing of al-Mabhouh, forging passports is much worse than murder. He, like most humane observers, begs to differ:

This apparent international consensus that assassination is a legitimate tool of foreign policy is a very sinister development. State-sponsored murder is still murder. And murder is still a worse offence than using forged passports.

As for President Obama, he is presumably monitoring the situation. Having determined that Hellfire missiles circumvent a host of intractable legal issues, the world’s only other enthusiastic proponent of so-called targeted killing is unlikely to condemn the latest episode in Mossad’s ongoing killing spree.

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Netanyahu authorized Dubai assassination

The Sunday Times reports:

In early January two black Audi A6 limousines drove up to the main gate of a building on a small hill in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv: the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, known as the “midrasha”.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stepped out of his car and was greeted by Meir Dagan, the 64-year-old head of the agency. Dagan, who has walked with a stick since he was injured in action as a young man, led Netanyahu and a general to a briefing room.

According to sources with knowledge of Mossad, inside the briefing room were some members of a hit squad. As the man who gives final authorisation for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a member of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.

Mossad had received intelligence that Mabhouh was planning a trip to Dubai and they were preparing an operation to assassinate him there, off-guard in a luxury hotel. The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners.

The mission was not regarded as unduly complicated or risky, and Netanyahu gave his authorisation, in effect signing Mabhouh’s death warrant.

Haaretz adds:

Haaretz has learned that German officials are examining the identity of Michael Bodenheimer, the name that appeared on a genuine German passport allegedly used in last month’s assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The authorities in the city of Cologne, where the passport was issued, began a probe, and federal authorities are now considering a move of their own.

According to German weekly Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer, an Israeli, applied for a German passport from the Cologne authorities. Bodenheimer presented documents that proved German lineage, including his grandparents’ marriage certificate. He also showed his Israeli passport that was issued to him a year earlier in Tel Aviv.

The German passport was issued on June 18, 2009. That document was used by one of the assassination suspects in Dubai on January 19, a day before the killing.

According to Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer does not live in Cologne, as he had claimed in his application, and no other person by that name lives there. The magazine claims a man by that name lived in Herzliya until June last year.

Haaretz has learned that a Michael Bodenheimer lives in Bnei Brak. His wife told Haaretz in a telephone interview that “he has no German passport and he never asked for such a passport. He never visited Germany, except perhaps in transit on the way to the United States.”

His wife added that the ultra-Orthodox family does not have any family in Herzliya and that even though Bodenheimer’s grandparents were born in Germany, they emigrated to the United States, from where he immigrated to Israel 30 years ago.

“We are quiet people and are not used to so much attention,” she told Haaretz yesterday. “The past week since the news of this story broke has been difficult for us. The fact that someone is using his name does not make him involved in this story.”

Bodenheimer studies at a kollel, a yeshiva for married men. He has said he was astounded to see his name on the list of suspects, supposedly belonging to a German citizen.

“At first we didn’t understand what everyone was talking about,” Bodenheimer’s daughter said. “The picture that was published doesn’t look like him at all. He is always busy with Torah study,” she said, adding that he holds no citizenship other than Israeli and American.

The German media have reported that the intelligence services of the country are certain that the Mossad was involved in the killing and that the foreign minister demanded that Israel explain why it used a German passport.

Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Yoram Ben-Ze’ev, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was asked about information that can shed light on the killing of Mabhouh.

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said yesterday that he does not expect relations between Israel and European countries whose passports were used in the assassination to deteriorate as a result of the incident.

“I do not expect a crisis in relations because there is nothing linking Israel to the assassination. Britain, France and Germany are countries with shared interests with Israel in countering terrorism,” Ayalon said, naming three of the four countries whose passports were used. At least three of the suspects used Irish passports.

Meanwhile, Hamas blamed Israel again yesterday for the hit. At a press conference, Salah al-Bardawil, one of the group’s Gaza-based leaders, said he does not suspect that the Palestinian Authority was involved in the killing and that the entire affair was the responsibility of Mossad.

However, the Hamas official said that the two Palestinians arrested in Dubai in connection with the killing are former officers in the Palestinian security services and were employed in a firm owned by a senior member of rival Fatah.

The London-based newspaper Al-Hayat reported that this company is owned by Mohammed Dahlan, formerly a Fatah strongman in the Gaza Strip before its takeover by Hamas two and a half years ago.

Bardawil said that Mabhouh had put himself at risk by booking his trip through the Internet and risked a security breach by telling his family in Gaza by telephone which hotel he would be staying at.

Also yesterday, the daily newspaper Al-Bayan reported that Dubai police had new evidence implicating the Mossad in Mabhouh’s assassination, which included credit-card payments and suspects’ phone records.

“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized [from the passports],” Al-Bayan quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.

Meanwhile, a Qatar news agency reported that Egyptian officials promised Dubai counterparts that they would try to persuade Israel to officially apologize for the assassination of Mabhouh in their country.

Egyptian diplomats told the newspaper Al-Arab that Dubai has asked Egypt to formally reprimand Israel for the hit.

On the issue of how Israel stole the identities of the individuals whose names were used by Mossad operatives, The Daily Telegraph says:

According to British sources, the Israelis got hold of the real passport details of six UK citizens living in Israel by taking their passports for “examination” as they passed through Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, copying the details and returning the original passports after a few minutes. The six fakes, along with German, French and Irish passports, were used to leave Dubai.

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Has Israel been helping supply weapons to Hamas?

The idea that Israel could be involved in supplying weapons to Hamas might sound like a preposterous conspiracy theory, but let’s look at some connections — the theory might not be as wild as it sounds.

In undisputed reports, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has been described as the top Hamas commander responsible for coordinating the flow of arms into Gaza. He is said to have established a smuggling route through Sudan — a route upon which a convoy of weapons was intercepted and destroyed in an Israeli drone attack just over a year ago.

From accounts of Mabhouh’s killing we know that he bought his ticket to Dubai just two days before traveling there and within just a few hours of his departure from Syria, an assassination team was en route to the same destination. Nineteen hours before the assassination, fifteen operatives left on flights for Dubai, departing from France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. The Times reported that Mabhouh was “tracked from the moment he boarded Emirates flight EK 912 at Damascus at 10.05 on January 19.”

I said “an assassination team” but from hereon I’ll refer to them as the Mossad operatives. Until one of them is arrested and the Israeli government starts negotiating for his or her release, we won’t know with absolute certainty that this was a Mossad operation, but I’ll go with the Dubai police chief and say that we can be 99% sure.

The British and Irish governments would not haul in the Israeli ambassadors in London and Dublin to demand an explanation for the theft of their citizens’ passports simply on the basis of a rumor. Indeed, if Israel had been set up by one of its enemies, as some Israeli leaders have suggested, then Israel too would be launching an investigation into the breach of its own passport records. As well as being concerned about a serious security breach, Israeli would have every reason to want to pacify the concerns of those citizens who now fear that they are being placed at risk by their own government — Israelis such as Anshel Pfeffer, who writes:

Enough cases in the past have come to light in which the identities of Jews, most of whom were born outside of Israel, were used by Israeli secret agents. It is hard not to feel that there has been and still is a blatant disregard for the safety and privacy of those whose identities were used… [H]ow can Israel claim to be a democracy fighting terror and dictatorships, and continue to promote aliyah from Western countries, when this is the way it supposedly treats its citizens?

Far from allaying such anxieties, Israeli officials have thus far seemed much more interested in gloating over an operational success. “Mossad knows how to get the job done,” said one minister, while the Israeli embassy in London, though claiming ignorance about the assassination, saw fit to brag on Twitter about the “hit on #Dubai target”.

So let’s return to the sequence of events. There is compelling evidence that the Mossad operatives who killed Mabhouh had plenty of lead time. Indeed, there’s reason to suppose that rather than this being a strike provided by an opportunity, it was a carefully laid trap that the Hamas commander walked straight into.

We know that he left Damascus confident enough for his security detail to face an acceptable delay. This was no blind date. Yet the information released by Dubai suggests that the only people he met once he got there were his killers. Did he miss his contact or did his contact turn out to have deceived him?

It is now reported that Israel provided British intelligence with advance notice of an “overseas operation” that would involve the use of fake British passports. A Mossad officer said Britain’s Foreign Office was also informed hours before Mabhouh’s murder.

If word was out among intelligence agencies, it would come as no surprise if Dubai was also conducting its own surveillance operation. A review of the CCTV images they released, along with the speed with which they identified the members of the Mossad team, does indeed suggest that to some degree they were able to track events as they unfolded and not merely piece together the evidence after the fact.

In some of the videos, the camera appears to be tracking its subject — a mere coincidence that the individuals walked in the same direction the camera was moving? Perhaps.

In the montage of clips put together by Gulf News‘ GNTV, there is another intriguing element. At 13 minutes 40 seconds we see one of the suspects exiting his hotel. The caption reads: “16.14 [local time, January 19] Kevin leaves the hotel and heads towards Al-Bustan Rotana.”

As “Kevin” is stepping into a taxi, a large man — he looks like an American — in jeans, pale blue t-shirt and dark blue jacket, strolls up as the next in line for a taxi. In the video his face has been digitally obscured. Why? Did he have Kevin under surveillance or might he be one of the thus far unnamed suspects?

In all of the video sequences there is only one other individual whose identity is obscured. This comes at 20 minutes 37 seconds in the montage. Kevin is speaking on a cell phone, strolling back and forth in front of the elevator doors in the lobby adjacent to Mabhouh’s room. A large individual exits the right side elevator and engages with Kevin, then exits the lobby walking in the direction of the crime scene. Throughout the sequence the individual’s image has been digitally obscured. In general appearance he looks like an over-weight middle-aged American.

We know that five credit cards issued by American banks were used in the operation. There is an American element to this story that so far remains veiled.

So, keeping in mind all of the above, how do I come to my audacious claim that Israel has been helping supply Hamas with weapons? This doesn’t have to be quite as conspiratorial a theory as it sounds.

The bombing of the Sudan convoy suggests that Mabhouh’s supply network was infiltrated some time ago and though Israel’s much-repeated goal is to stop the flow of weapons into Gaza, the weapons themselves are perhaps less of a concern than is finding the means to weaken or disable Hamas.

What better way of infiltrating the Islamist movement than through its weapons supply chain?

If the Iranian arms dealers in Dubai have been conspicuous by their absence from this story, perhaps it’s because the trap Mabhouh fell into involved Israelis posing as Iranians.

After all, the involvement of governments in illicit arms dealing for political purposes is not unheard of — one of Israel’s closest friends, Elliot Abrams, knows the routine.

Further comment: As presented by Israeli leaders the issue of Gaza is without deviation always treated as a security threat. Gaza, under Hamas’ control presents a threat to southern Israel as in recent years cities such as Sderot have come under persistent rocket attack.

How then is it conceivable that Israel would allow a single weapon to find its way into the Palestinian enclave even if there might be an intelligence payoff from being able to infiltrate and monitor a weapons supply chain?

Wrong question. If Israel really wanted to effectively control the flow of weapons into Gaza it would never have imposed a blockade that resulted in the construction of thousands of smuggling tunnels under the Rafah border.

The surest way of rigorously controlling what gets into Gaza is through a stringently monitored open border. If goods could be brought in overland, there would be little economic incentive for constructing tunnels.

Rather than preventing the flow of weapons, Israel’s greater interest has been in punishing the Palestinian population in the naive hope that people living in great deprivation would turn against their political leaders.

Israel, confident in its ability to use overwhelming force to crush its opponents, has less interest in disarming the Palestinians than it does in breaking their will to fight.

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This is no ripping yarn, but a murder to fan more conflict

Seumas Milne writes:

… since launching its war on terror, the US has also adopted Israel’s practice, stretching back decades, of carrying out killings far from the theatre of war. First, Israel’s attacks were targeted against PLO leaders; more recently against the ­Islamists. But since the fiasco of the Mish’al plot [in Jordan in 1997], its assassinations have mostly been confined to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Israel made a determined attempt over the past ­decade to decapitate Hamas of its entire leadership.

Now that focus has again widened. Under the direction of Mossad director Meir Dagan, Israel is running a region-wide underground war against the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas – which have both maintained an effective ceasefire for more than a year – and their Syrian and Iranian backers. Since the ­killing of ­veteran Hezbollah leader Imad ­Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, Israeli-hallmarked assassinations have ­multiplied in Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

But coldblooded ­killing isn’t only a morally ­repugnant crime. The lesson of ­colonial ­history is that ­decapitation ­campaigns against ­national ­resistance movements don’t work. In the short term they can disrupt and demoralise, but if the ­movement is socially rooted, other ­leaders or even organisations will take their place. That was Israel’s ­experience when it killed the Hezbollah leader ­Abbas al-Musawi and his family in the early 1990s, only for him to be succeeded by the more effective and ­charismatic Hassan Nasrallah.

Such campaigns also tend to spread the war. Unlike the historic PLO ­factions, Hamas has always confined its armed attacks to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Writing in The Guardian in 2007, Mish’al confirmed the “principle that the resistance should only be fought in Palestine”. But in the aftermath of the Dubai assassination, Hamas leaders have started to hint strongly that policy could now change, and that they could respond to Israel’s attacks in “the ­international arena”.

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The Dahlan connection – Updated

Update – Ayman Taha, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, was reported saying: “These statements concerning PA [Palestinian Authority] involvement [in Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s murder] are too hasty. This is not the official position of the movement, that the PA was involved. When the investigation is finished, we will announce who is behind the killing.” His statement followed reports such as the one below from Ynet identifying two Palestinians detained in Dubai and a report in The Guardian claiming that a Hamas operative Nahro Massoud was being questioned in Damascus about the Dubai killing.

Asharq Alawsat adds:

In Jordan, an informed Palestinian source said that it was likely that the two Palestinians who were handed over to the UAE authorities by Jordan were in possession of Palestinian passports specifically used by Gaza Strip residents. He said that the two Palestinians were most likely residing in the UAE, and fled the country via the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman aboard a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight but without first securing the proper visas, and were therefore not allowed to enter Jordanian territory.

The source, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that any Palestinian living abroad or in the Gaza Strip needs a visa from the Jordanian Ministry of Interior and the consent of the security services prior to entering Jordan, whereas West Bank citizens are able to enter Jordan via the King Hussein Bridge and are not required to obtain all of these documents. He said that the two Palestinians were arrested in the airports transit lounge after the security services received information from UAE authorities that the two wanted figures had boarded a plane to Jordan.

The source also confirmed that the two Palestinians were held until a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight could take them back to Dubai the next day. The Palestinian ambassador to Jordan, Atallah Khairy denied that the two individuals have any ties to the Palestinian Authority, and he also confirmed to Asharq Al-Awsat that the Palestinian Authority does not have anything to do with this assassination. Khairy also pointed out that senior Hamas official Ayman Taha, who originally leveled these accusations at the Palestinian Authority had retracted his statement.

Whatever the role of the two Palestinians detained by the Dubai police, one fact is striking: all the other operatives belonging to the team that they were supposedly collaborating with made a clean getaway. So how come these two guys didn’t have suitable travel documents? It makes you wonder whether they were recruited simply as a means to try and so division among Palestinians.

While the diplomatic fallout from the Dubai murder continues to expand, there are several new twists in the story.

Though the real identities of the murder suspects whose passport photographs have been released are unknown, two Palestinian suspects under arrest in Dubai have been linked to Mohammed Dahlan, the Fatah security chief who was ousted from Gaza in June 2007. Dahlan has been accused in the past of collaborating with Israel and being a CIA agent.

A senior Hamas official told Ynet on Thursday that Anwar Shheibar and Ahmad Hasnain, two officers in the Palestinian General Security Services suspected of being involved in the assassination of Hamas’ Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, fled the Gaza Strip after Hamas took power. The suspects were arrested in Jordan and handed over to the Dubai police following the hit.

Shheibar is a resident of the Sabra neighborhood, west of Gaza City, and Hasnain is a member of one of the large families in the Sajaiya neighborhood. The two, both in their 30s, were members in what was known until a few years ago as “the death cells” led by Nabil Tamus, who claimed he was an associate of senior Fatah member Mohammad Dahlan.

These cells, according to Fatah rivals and Dahlan’s rivals, regularly suppressed Palestinian Authority opponents, especially among Hamas members.

Tamus, who led the cells, also left the Gaza Strip around the time Hamas took power. According to Palestinian reports and according to the senior Hamas official, the three were employed by Mohammad Dahlan’s real estate and investment firms in Dubai.

In the past, Dahlan, for his part, vehemently denied conducting any such activities in the United Arab Emirates. “I don’t have the towers people say I have in Dubai,” he used to say in interviews with the media.

Both Shheibar and Hasnain recently received their salaries from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Hamas claims that their arrest proves beyond any doubt that the PA had direct collaboration and deep operational involvement in every detail of the assassination.

Hamas also claims that the Mossad enjoyed logistical support from the two men, who lived in Dubai in recent years, and thus were deeply familiar with the UAE. Hamas said publicly in the past few days that the two are associated with Dahlan’s camp.

Robert Fisk, based on the observations of an “impeccable” source in Abu Dhabi, says that Israel’s intelligence service is suspected by the UAE of having received European assistance.

Collusion. That’s what it’s all about. The United Arab Emirates suspect – only suspect, mark you – that Europe’s “security collaboration” with Israel has crossed a line into illegality, where British passports (and those of other other EU nations) can now be used to send Israeli agents into the Gulf to kill Israel’s enemies. At 3.49pm yesterday afternoon (Beirut time, 1.49pm in London), my Lebanese phone rang. It was a source – impeccable, I know him, he spoke with the authority I know he has in Abu Dhabi – to say that “the British passports are real. They are hologram pictures with the biometric stamp. They are not forged or fake. The names were really there. If you can fake a hologram or biometric stamp, what does this mean?”

The voice – I know the man and his origins well – wants to talk. “There are 18 people involved in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Besides the 11 already named, there are two Palestinians who are being interrogated and five others, including a woman. She was part of the team that staked out the hotel lobby.” Two hours later, an SMS arrives on my Beirut phone from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. It is the same source.

“ONE MORE THING,” it says in capital letters, then continues in lower case. “The command room of the operation was in Austria (sic, in fact, all things are “sic” in this report)… meaning the suspects when here did not talk to each other but thru the command room on separate lines to avoid detection or linking themselves to one another… but it was detected and identified OK??” OK? I ask myself.

My source is both angry and insistent. “We have sent out details of the 11 named people to Interpol. Interpol has circulated them to 188 countries – but why hasn’t Britain warned foreign nations that these people are using passports in these names?” There was more to come.

“We have identified five credit cards belonging to these people, all issued in the United States.” The man will not give the EU nationalities of the extra five – this would make two women involved in Mr Mabhouh’s murder. He said that EU countries were cooperating with the UAE, including the UK. But “not one of the countries we have been speaking to has notified Interpol of the passports used in their name. Why not?”

The intrigue will not stop there.

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Will Dubai issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu?

Update below
Dubai’s police chief has now fingered Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, as being responsible for the murder of , on January 19, Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National:

“Our investigations reveal that Mossad is involved in the murder of al Mabhouh. It is 99 per cent, if not 100 per cent that Mossad is standing behind the murder,” said Gen Tamim.

The evidence that Dubai Police have shows a clear link between the suspects and people with a close connection to Israel, according to Gen Tamim. However, he did not disclose what the evidences were.

Earlier Gen Tamim had said if it is proven that Mossad is responsible for the killing of al Mabhouh “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai’ and that an arrest warrant will be issued against him.

However, today Gen Tamim declined to comment on whether the UAE authorities is to issue an arrest warrant for Mr Netanyahu.

Dubai’s Gulf News has compiled a video of the CCTV footage that shows the assassins tracking their target. (There is no audio with this presentation.)

The Times provides an account of the movements of the assassins in the hours before and after al-Mahbouh’s murder.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that it was an “outrage” that the Dubai assassins had used British passports and the British government has launched an investigation.

Mr Miliband spoke out after the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, was called to the Foreign Office to discuss the affair, which is rapidly escalating into a major diplomatic crisis.

“We wanted to give Israel every opportunity to share with us what it knows about this incident,” Mr Miliband said.

“We hope and expect that they will co-operate fully with the investigation that has been launched by the Prime Minister and will be undertaken by the Serious Organised Crime Agency.”

Mr Miliband denied that the UK Government was merely “going through the motions” of asking questions about the incident.

It is too soon to say how great the diplomatic fallout will be but since all the countries whose passports were used illegally — Britain, Ireland, France and Germany — are EU members, it seems likely that the matter will rise to the level of European Union involvement.
The BBC‘s Paul Reynolds writes:

At this stage, it is a matter of Britain asking questions, not making protests and taking retaliatory action (such as demanding an apology, restricting official contacts or even expelling the ambassador for a time).

During his meeting with Mr Prosor, the permanent under-secretary Sir Peter Ricketts asked for full Israeli cooperation with the British inquiry. This is likely to prove problematic if Mossad was involved. Israel would not want to reveal too much. So a lot depends on how the word “cooperation” is defined. A total failure to cooperate would trigger a British response.

One complicating factor is that in 1987, the Israelis promised Britain that it would not use British passports in secret operations again.

On that occasion, eight British passports reckoned to be for Mossad agents were found in a bag in a West German telephone booth.

The then Israeli ambassador in London Yehuda Avner did find himself on the receiving end of a British protest.

If it turns out that the assurance given then has been broken the British diplomatic reaction will be the more severe.

Updated: It sounds as though Dubai’s police chief is now backing off from his earlier threat to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Reuters reports:

Interpol should issue a warrant to help locate and arrest the head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad if the organization was responsible for the killing of a Hamas militant in Dubai, the emirate’s police chief said Thursday.

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British relations with Israel in ‘deep freeze’ as Dubai killing row escalates

The Guardian reports:

Britain last night fired the first shot in a potentially explosive diplomatic row with Israel by calling in the country’s ambassador to explain the use of faked British passports by a hit squad who targeted a Hamas official in Dubai.

The Israeli ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office to “share information” about the assassins’ use of identities stolen from six British citizens living in Israel, as part of the meticulously orchestrated assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Britain has stopped short of accusing Israel of involvement, but to signal its displeasure, the Foreign Office ignored an Israeli plea to keep the summons secret. “Relations were in the freezer before this. They are in the deep freeze now,” an official told the Guardian.

In an editorial, The Guardian said:

British passports are the property of the British government. When that government says and does nothing for six days after it was given evidence that Mossad agents stole the identity of six British citizens to assassinate a Hamas commander in Dubai, it starts to seem as if Israel was right to think it could get away with it. The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, yesterday predicted the incident would have no effect on British relations.

The decision last night to call in the Israeli ambassador to “share information” does not change this basic position. If Britain were less supine in its dealings, it would realise it is not in its interests to let Israel wage its war with Hamas under a British flag. What happened was a breach of trust between two nations who are ostensibly allies. The identity theft endangers not just the lives of six passport holders and their families, but potentially anyone carrying a British passport in the Arab world. Faced by a growing political clamour, Gordon Brown was forced to call for a full investigation into how fraudulent British passports were used. We all, alas, know the prime minister’s predilection for investigations that fizzle out. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), led by Sir Ian Andrews, formerly at the Ministry of Defence, will work with the Dubai authorities.

Dubai has already issued its own arrest warrants, but at the very least, the evidence that Soca gathers should be presented to Israel with a demand for an explanation. Britain is not the only country involved in this affair. Dubai believed that 11 agents with European passports were involved in the murder. If Israel disregards Soca, matters should be taken up at EU level. Mossad agents routinely use false identities and forged western passports, and each time they are caught doing it Israel gives assurances they will not do it again. It did so to Britain when the issue came up in 1987. Ten years later it gave the same assurances to Canada, after Mossad agents entered Jordan on doctored Canadian passports and bungled an attempt to kill the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal with poison. Two suspected Israeli agents were jailed in New Zealand for obtaining the country’s passports illegally. These diplomatic assurances are evidently worthless.

The only thing that will give Mossad pause for thought the next time it eyes a target for assassination is if its political masters are made to feel the consequences of its actions. There are at any given moment a plethora of tools at the disposal of Britain and the EU, from bilateral diplomatic contacts and military contacts to arms and trade agreements. London is a key diplomatic listening post for the Middle East, and Britain is a vital interlocutor with the Palestinians. There are any number of ways of getting the message across, not least the question of whether to change the law to make it harder for British courts to issue arrest warrants, under the principle of universal jurisdiction, for former Israeli ministers accused of war crimes. The enduring mystery is why Britain has been so reluctant to pull the levers at its disposal.

The Mossad operation was described in Israel yesterday as a tactical operational success. There was relief that the right target was killed, and all Israel’s operatives got out safely. Israel is not the only country to carry out targeted assassinations. The US pursue the same policy with drones against the Taliban and al-Qaida in North Waziristan. The charge of hypocrisy is swiftly levelled at those who condemn Israel’s strikes while carrying on the same policy in other theatres of war. But assassinations rarely achieve their advertised effect. If the purpose here was to stop Hamas acquiring arms from Iran in Dubai, it will not prevent Tehran from providing weapons through another channel, and the Hamas commander will be quickly replaced. Assassinations such as these might, however, give Arab states even less reason than they already have to normalise relations with Israel. Is that a tactical success or a strategic failure?

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Five Israelis had their identities stolen – apparently by Mossad!

Anyone who is Jewish but doesn’t have a Jewish sounding name and who has been considering emigrating to Israel might soon be having second thoughts.

To the extent that Israel provides a safe haven to Jews, it turns out your religious identity might count for less than your name.

The Israeli government has yet to acknowledge that the murder of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai last month was carried out by Mossad, but the evidence is now overwhelming.

But the fact that Mossad carried out the killing may turn out to concern Israelis (and Jews elsewhere) less than the apparent willingness of the Israeli intelligence agency to put the lives and liberty of Israeli citizens in jeopardy by stealing their identities.

It now turns out that five Israeli dual nationals claim their identities were stolen in order to provide the Dubai killers with fake passports. (Update – Israel’s Hebrew Ma’ariv now reports that seven Israelis had their identities stolen.)

Haaretz reports:

At least five Israelis awoke Tuesday morning to find their names tied to the assassination of senior Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his Dubai hotel room last month. All were stunned to find their names displayed on passports that police in the emirate said were used by the assailants.

However, the people pictured in the photos released by police looked nothing like them. All denied involvement in the affair.

“I’m in shock – I just don’t understand how something like this could happen,” said Paul John Keeley, a British-born repairman who lives on Kibbutz Nahsholim, near Zichron Yaakov. Keeley’s name appeared on the British passport Dubai authorities said belonged to one of the hit men.

“From the moment I heard about it I was very worried. I’m worried for my family,” said Keeley, who immigrated to Israel more than a decade ago. “The fact that it was my name that was published in this context makes me worry that someone will try to harm us.”

Keeley, 43 and a father of three, said Tuesday his passport was in his possession before, on and after January 20, the day Mabhouh was assassinated.

“I don’t know who a person calls when his identity is stolen,” he said. “I’m waiting for someone from the British or Israeli government to contact me and give me answers. I don’t understand how something like this could happen.”

Amir Oren adds:

Using the identities of real, living, innocent Israelis for operational documentation is against the law. This kind of abuse also causes innocent civilians to suffer the evil that already plagues ministers and officers: being prevented from traveling abroad for fear of being arrested by Interpol on suspicion of being the Dubai assassins.

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy pushed for a Mossad Law to be legislated that would enshrine the state’s obligation to defend its agents caught breaking laws abroad. The initiative never got off the ground: A state can’t legitimize illegality. But neither can it allow one of its institutions to arbitrarily harm civilians — not the police, not the tax authority, not the Shin Bet security service and not the Mossad.

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein was asked yesterday whether an investigation will be opened following the public complaints of those whose identities were stolen from them, and whose lives and liberty are therefore now threatened. Weinstein has not yet had time to study the issue.

Oren is calling for Mossad chief Meir Dagan to be fired. But why stop there? Who can be so naive as to doubt that this operation was conducted with the authorization and at the behest of the Israeli prime minister himself.

Imagine a parallel in the United States. Richard Nixon couldn’t get away with ordering a burglary – can Netanyahu put his own citizens in jeopardy while ordering a murder?

This may end up not merely undermining public confidence in government officials; it might even shake Jewish confidence in Zionism.

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British officials say Mossad murdered Hamas commander

If the investigation into the murder of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 20, establishes that it was carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, Dubai police have said they will issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While this would not be the first time an Israeli leader faced the risk of arrest, unlike previous instances which have involved alleged war crimes, in this instance Netanyahu would presumably be treated as a co-conspirator to pre-meditated murder in a case that already involves Interpol.

Following the announcement by Dubai police that six of the murder suspects were carrying British passports and another three Irish passports, The Daily Telegraph reports:

British government sources told The Daily Telegraph there was no “corroboration” within Whitehall of any British involvement in the assassination plot.

Government sources also said that officials do not believe any Irish nationals were involved but were Mossad agents using Irish passports.

Ten days ago The National reported:

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be at the top of Dubai’s wanted list if the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad is proven to be behind the killing of a senior Hamas official, the Dubai Police chief said yesterday.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National that “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an arrest warrant against him.”

The BBC reports:

The British and Irish governments have said that passports belonging to the alleged killers of a top Hamas official are fake.

Ireland said the names Gail Folliard, Evan Dennings and Kevin Daveron, and their passport numbers, did not match anything issued by its officials.

Britain said it believed six British passports were also fakes.

The Times reports:

Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli Prime Minister, in a speech at the weekend, alluded to a report in The Times on Saturday that Mossad was waging a covert war of assassinations across the Middle East, targeting Hamas and Iranian officials.

“There are a huge range of options between a full military attack and accepting a nuclear Iran,” Mr Olmert said. “There are other means that, together with other things happening, and they are happening, can create a result that would not allow the Iranians to reach what they are trying to reach.”

One former Mossad agent confirmed that the organisation regularly used foreign passports for travel abroad on secret missions.

“Sometimes these were legitimate passports of people who held dual citizenship, other times they were acquired,” he said. “An Israeli passport raises red flags and is best avoided.”

Assuming that this was indeed a Mossad operation, in a suprising twist, it appears that the Israeli agents stole the identity of a British-Israeli who is now trying to clear his name.

Dubai has identified Melvyn Adam Mildiner as one of six British passport holders believed to have been involved in the death of al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel.

Speaking from his home near Jerusalem, Mr Mildiner said: “The details of the passport are not all wrong. My name is spelt correctly and the number is correct, but the date of birth was wrong. The picture with it is not me. Whoever took my identity took parts of it but not everything.

“I have my own real passport stored properly here at home. It has not, as far as I am aware, been away. It has no Dubai stamps. I have never been to Dubai.”

Mr Mildiner, who was born in London and made aliyah in 2001, added: “I went to bed with pneumonia and woke up accused of murder on an international scale.”

He said no British or Israeli officials had yet contacted him to discuss the situation.

He has hired a lawyer and is awaiting advice on how to clear his name.

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Dubai murder increasingly looks like intel operation

Dubai police have released the passport photographs of 11 suspects linked to the murder of Mahmoud al Mabhouh, a Hamas leader who was found dead in his hotel room in Dubai on January 20. All the suspects carried European passports. There’s no conclusive proof yet that this was a Mossad operation but the images above do at least carry suggestions that the individuals involved had taken measures to conceal their identities.

For instance, this crew all seem to go to an optician who specializes in retro-frames – hunky ugly ones that stand out until the operative stops wearing them or switches to an everyday designer frame. The woman, minus blond wig and ruby lipstick would also lose her signature look. Six shaved/croped heads – again, a few months of hair growth and they’ll be harder to pick out.

As Dubai police indicated in their briefing, this team even went to the lengths of avoiding using cell phones. Add all this up and this looks like an operation meticulously designed to be clandestine. The killers didn’t simply want to eliminate their target — they wanted to create the appearance that he had died of natural causes. It’s hard to ascribe that objective to a criminal motive or to imagine that a criminal organization would have the luxury of deploying eleven people to kill one man.

Haaretz reports:

Dubai will issue arrest warrants soon for 11 Europeans suspected in the killing of a senior Hamas official, but its police chief said Monday that he was still not ruling out Israeli involvement.

“We do not rule out Mossad, but when we arrest those suspects we will know who masterminded it. [We have not] issued arrest warrants yet, but will do soon,” police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim told reporters.

Dubai Police Chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim told reporters that the alleged assassination team comprised six British passport holders, three Irish and one each from France and Germany.

A leading suspect, who carried a French passport, had left Dubai for Munich via Qatar after the killing, Tamim added.

“We do not rule out (the Israeli intelligence agency) Mossad, but when we arrest those suspects we will know who masterminded it. [We have not] issued arrest warrants yet, but will do soon,” he said.

“Israel carries out a lot of assassinations in many countries, even in countries that it is allied to,” Tamim said, adding that Mabhouh may have been killed by electrocution.

Tamim said two Palestinians suspected of providing logistical support in Mabhouh’s killing were being held by police. Al Arabiya television said the pair had been handed over by Jordan.

Tamim said the 11 still wanted had rented a hotel room opposite Mabhouh’s around the time of his death. All are believed to have left Dubai.

The mercenaries were apparently dressed in tennis gear and visited several hotels on the day of the assasination in order to remain inconspicuous.

Tamim also said forensic tests indicate al-Mabhouh died of suffocation, but lab analyses are still under way.

Violent crime is rare in Dubai, part of the UAE and a regional trading and tourism hub.

Like most Arab countries, the UAE has no diplomatic ties with Israel and Israelis are routinely denied entry.

It refused a visa for Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer to take part in a e2 million tournament in Dubai last year, although she was able to enter for this year’s championship.

Last week the a Paris-based journal dedicated to tracking intelligence activity worldwide, Intelligence Online, reported that ten agents, including three women, participated in the assassination in January.

The journal published what it termed “new details” about the operation, which has been widely attributed to Israel’s Mossad intelligence service. It said that one of the female agents dressed herself in the uniform of a reception clerk at Al Bustan Rotana, the hotel where Mabhouh was staying, and then knocked on his door.

When he opened it her fellow operatives rushed him and stunned him with an electric device, the journal said, then they injected poison into his veins, in order to disguise the cause of death.

Previous reports spoke of seven agents, all carrying Irish passports.

The journal added that Dubai’s secret service had requested assistance in the investigation from its counterparts in Egypt and Jordan and from Interpol. Yet it seems unlikely that Egypt or Jordan could provide much help as both are hostile to Hamas. Indeed, both country’s secret services are engaged in their own war against Hamas operatives.

The journal said that Dubai’s government had ordered that Hamas itself be kept out of the probe, but Hamas is conducting its own investigation headed by the organization’s number two, Moussa Abu Marzook, with help from Iran and Syria.

Top Hamas figures have denied that al-Mabhouh was en route to Iran, a major Hamas backer.

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New light cast on the recent murder of an Iranian physicist

The Economist reports:

When a motorcycle was blown up by remote control in Tehran last month, killing Masoud Alimohammadi, a professor of physics, the regime blamed “the triangle of wickedness”—Israel, America and their “hired agents”.

It is no secret that America, Israel and European countries are seeking to impede Iran’s nuclear plans, overtly and covertly. Yet the assassination theory was widely dismissed. The professor’s known works on particle and theoretical physics did not seem central to Iran’s nuclear programme. And his name had appeared on a list of Iranian academics favouring Iran’s protest movement. So, ran the prevailing theory, Israel or America had little reason to kill him, though Iranian hardliners may have wanted to do so.

But listen to the whispers of Western spies and diplomats, and the Iranian regime may turn out to be right. Well-placed sources in two Western countries now say the professor was “one of the most important people involved in the programme”.

Such conclusions, admit some, are based on “imperfect insight” into the workings of Iran’s nuclear establishment that includes the public and ostensibly civil projects run by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) and an overlapping but secret organisation run by the ministry of defence that focuses more on turning fissile material into nuclear weapons.

The AEOI said it had not employed Mr Alimohammadi. Several Iran-watchers said they had never heard of him until his death. But a Western counter-proliferation source says he “is known to have worked closely” with two key figures in Iran’s ministry of defence, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi and Fereidoun Abbasi-Davani. Both are on the UN’s sanctions list of Iranians whose assets are to be seized and whose travels must be reported to the UN.

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Netanyahu faces arrest in Hamas hotel murder if Mossad link proved

From The National:

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be at the top of Dubai’s wanted list if the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad is proven to be behind the killing of a senior Hamas official, the Dubai Police chief said yesterday.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National that “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an
arrest warrant against him.”

He did not, however, assert that Mossad was definitively responsible for the killing; Hamas has accused the Israeli agency of killing Mr al Mabhouh.

The website of Ireland’s Evening Herald reports:

Members of a hit squad who killed a top Hamas military commander used Irish passports to enter and leave Dubai, it’s been claimed.

The suspected Israeli hit team, including at least one woman, entered the United Arab Emirates using Irish documents, police authorities said.

Before jumping to any conclusions about the nationalities of the assassins in Dubai, it’s worth remembering that when Mossad agents attempted to murder Hamas’ political leader Khalid Meshaal in Jordan in 1997, the Israelis were using Canadian passports.

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Hamas denied entry to Dubai after killing

From The National:

Dubai’s chief of police, Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, confirmed that a Hamas delegation would not be allowed to enter the UAE following the slaying of one of its senior operatives in the emirate.

Mahmoud al Mabhouh was killed in his hotel room on January 20.

Gen Tamim said: “We will not allow a Hamas delegation to enter the country, and we will only deal with the Palestinian Embassy and consulate, which are the official representatives in the country. We do not acknowledge the differences. For us, there is only one Palestine, not two.”

There is frustration in Hamas’ Damascus offices over the way the UAE has handled the killing of al Mabhouh, who they say was a frequent visitor to Dubai.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one senior Hamas official questioned the speed of Dubai’s response to the killing.

“Al Mabhouh was killed on January 20, but there was no announcement until 29 January. That’s almost 10 days. What was the reason for the delay?” he asked. “Such delays gave lots of time for the murderers to escape.”

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