Mounting evidence Mossad behind Dubai assassination of Hamas leader

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Mounting evidence Mossad behind Dubai assassination of Hamas leader
By Chris Marsden
18 February 2010

There is mounting evidence that Mossad, Israel’s secret service,
organised the hit squad that murdered senior Hamas official Mahmoud al
Mabhouh in Dubai on the evening of January 19. The assassins used the
stolen identities of six British citizens and faked at least five
other European passports. Not only does this fit a pattern of previous
Israeli operations, but five of those whose identities were used live
in Israel.

Eleven people have been identified as part of the assassination team,
but Dubai has said it is seeking 17 agents with a command centre
working from Austria.

Mabhouh was a prime target for Israeli security. One of the founders
of Hamas’s military wing, he was considered the key figure in the
smuggling of weaponry from Iran to the Gaza Strip and was wanted by
Israel after boasting of the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli
soldiers—Ilan Saadon and Avi Sasportas—while on leave in 1989.

The assassination was highly professional. Dubai has issued warrants
for “premeditated murder” against 10 men and 1 woman and is seeking a
“red notice” from Interpol so they can be sought abroad. Dubai’s
attorney general, Essam al-Humaidan, said that the United Arab
Emirates had signed judicial treaties with a number of European countries.

The six as yet unknown killers include a second woman, who was
accompanied by a large man. Another unknown man was part of the core
team of seven that carried out the actual killing.

Two Palestinians are being questioned in Dubai, after having been
extradited from Jordan on “strong suspicion” that one of them had met
a member of the suspected hit team before the assassination.

The hit squad arrived on different flights and checked into different
hotels. They were captured on surveillance cameras following Mabhouh
when he arrived in Dubai—reportedly to buy weapons. He was murdered in
his room at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel last month near Dubai’s
international airport by suffocation or strangulation. The assassins
paid in cash for everything and used several cell phones. They left
Dubai on flights to Europe and Asia—all within two hours of Mabhouh’s
death. His body was discovered on January 20.

The Independent noted: “Surveillance videos shown by the Dubai police
indicate that the 11 suspects achieved remarkable penetration. They
were in and out of Dubai in less than 19 hours.”

A former Mossad operative told the newspaper that the operation
appeared meticulously planned and executed. “This was super-,
super-professional,” he said. “It seems logical that this was a Mossad
operation.”

The ex-agent added that it would “not be surprising” if other
“positively inclined” countries had helped Israel, including Egypt.

A number of former Mossad staff made statements admiring the
“professionalism” of the assassination. National security specialist
Yossi Melman wrote in Ha’aretz last month, “The intelligence [about
Dubai] was reliable and accurate…. Even though Mabhouh knew
Israeli-intelligence had him in its sights and took stringent
precautions they still managed to get him.”

Dubai police named 11 suspects they were searching for: 6 from
Britain, 3 from Ireland and 1 each from France and Germany. The faked
UK passports were in the names of Paul John Keeley, Melvyn Adam
Mildiner, Jonathan Louis Graham, Stephen Daniel Hodes, Michael
Lawrence Barney and James Clarke. UK authorities confirmed that the
killers had not altered the names and numbers in the passports, but
had changed the photographs.

The three Irish citizens named—Gail Foliard, Kevin Daveron and Evan
Dennings-—are all said to be fictitious names.

The German passport was in the name of Michael Bodenheimer. The German
government said the passport number was either incomplete or wrong.
The French authorities refused to comment on the authenticity of a
French passport used.

There is a long record of Mossad either utilising or seeking to gain
possession of foreign passports for its operations.

In July 1973, Mossad agent Sylvia Rafael, from South Africa, was
arrested in an assassination attempt in Norway that ended in the
killing of a Moroccan waiter. She utilised the forged identity of a
Canadian photographer, Patricia Roxburgh. Her fellow assassins were
arrested with the forged or borrowed identities of British and French
citizens.

In 1987, an Israel Military Industries courier left British passports
in a public telephone booth in Bonn, meant for use by Mossad agents.
Britain protested and said it received assurances that steps had been
taken to prevent future occurrences.

In 1997, a Mossad assassination squad used altered Canadian passports
in a failed attempt to kill Khaled Meshal, now the leader of Hamas.
Two agents were arrested in Amman after trying to spray poison into
his ear.

The Israeli government, then as now headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, was
forced to hand over an antidote that saved Khaled Mashal’s life and to
release Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

One of the passports belonged to a Jewish Canadian studying in Israel
who when first questioned said that he had been contacted and asked
for his passport to be used.

In 2005, two Israeli agents were jailed for six months in New Zealand
for obtaining the country’s passports illegally.

Killings by Mossad include PLO military chief Abu Jihad in Tunisia in
1988, as well as leaders of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The near-certain confirmation that Mossad was behind the assassination
was met with a perfunctory denial by the Israeli government. Israel’s
foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman of the far-right Israel Beiteinu,
said yesterday that the use of the identities of foreign-born Israelis
did not prove the involvement of Mossad.

“There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad, and not
some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief,” he
told Army Radio. However, he made a point of not denying absolutely
Israeli involvement, stating instead that Israel has a “policy of
ambiguity” on intelligence matters.

Lieberman claimed that there would be no diplomatic problems arising
from the suspicions of Mossad involvement. And an article in Ha’aretz
also claimed that “Israel has nothing to worry about.” Yossi Melman
wrote, “Many of the countries whose passports were allegedly used do
not like Hamas; and the government of Dubai, despite its impressive
investigation, does not really want to get to the bottom of this....
There are other Arab countries who do not consider Hamas a friend and
who are in a secret war—no less bitter than Israel’s—against the
Islamist organisation. Jordan is one of them, as is Egypt.”

He concluded that “unless dramatic evidence is found to definitively
prove an Israeli connection, it is likely that the State of Israel
will emerge from this affair unblemished and the Mossad will continue
enjoying a reputation of fearless determination and nearly unstoppable
capabilities.”

Despite such confident claims, what has been revealed so far has
created a major crisis for Israel, particularly coming so soon after
the UN Goldstone report accused it of war crimes during last year’s
Gaza offensive.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown was forced to call for a “full
investigation” into how fraudulent British passports were used by the
killers in an interview with London’s LBC 97.3 FM radio station. He
did so after demands from Liberal Democrat MP Sir Menzies Campbell for
the Foreign Office to summon the Israeli ambassador to give an
explanation and Hugo Swire, chairman of the opposition Conservative
Middle East Council, calling on the government to investigate claims
of Israeli involvement. “You cannot conduct foreign policy at this
extremely sensitive time by this sort of illegal behaviour,” he said.

Ha’aretz and others have called for the resignation of Mossad chief
Meir Dagan.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/moss-f18.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********