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Assassins caught on video reveals possible Mossad-Fatah link

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver
SunFebruary 24, 2010

The father of senior Hamas military commander Mahmoud
al-Mabhouh holds a picture of his son in the Gaza Strip Monday.

Photograph by: Mohammed Salem, Reuters, Vancouver
Sun

In deference to its friends and allies, Israel usually makes efforts to
spread a cloak of ambiguity and uncertainty over the regular assassinations of
perceived enemies carried out by its spy agency Mossad.

In most cases there have been enough face-saving questions about the
identities of the murderers and the motive for killings that Israel's allies in
Europe and North America are not forced to make public condemnations or
downgrade the relationship.

However, the killing on the night of Jan. 19 in a hotel in Dubai of Mahmoud
al-Mabhouh, a senior military commander of the Palestinian radical group Hamas
and its chief arms buyer, has been documented in far too much detail to be
ignored.

And this was clearly a Mossad operation. Dubai's police chief Dahi Khalfan
Tamim is so confident of his information he has called for the arrest of Meir
Dagan, the head of Mossad, who has a record of masterminding assassination
operations and who reportedly got Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to
personally sign off on the al-Mabhouh killing.

What has embarrassed Israel and may yet bring a chill to relations with
Europe and the United States is the professionalism of the Dubai police in
identifying the 15-member assassination team and in reconstructing its
movements.

Dubai has an extensive network of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras on
every street corner and other public places.

This network, as is well known from experience elsewhere, is not very useful
for preventing terrorist attacks or other murderous crimes. But it is very
helpful in reconstructing what happened after a crime has been committed.

Dubai also has some state-of-the-art facial recognition software.

These, together with police and security skills honed from working in one of
the main spy and arms-dealing marketplaces of the Middle East, enabled the Dubai
authorities to put together a minute-by-minute account of the hit team's
activities.

Even though the Mossad team was clearly aware of the dangers of Dubai's CCTV
-- members frequently changed clothes, wigs and hotels -- the entire sequence of
events was caught from the time the squad arrived from various European centres
the day before al-Mabhouh arrived from Syria on Jan. 19.

Facial recognition software enabled the Dubai police to match the hit squad
with the passports the members used to enter the country.

Much to Israel's embarrassment, it turns out that eight members of the team
used faked or forged British passports, six of them with identities stolen from
British-Israeli dual citizens living in Israel.

Five had doctored or forged Irish passports, one used a German passport, and
the man who managed the operation on the ground, and went by the name Peter
Elvinger, had a French passport.

The picture that emerges is of a highly professional assassination squad. The
operation went like clockwork and all the hit squad members had left Dubai for a
variety of destinations in Asia, Africa and Europe, before al-Mabhouh's body was
discovered in the hotel more than 12 hours after his death.

And his killing -- apparently by immobilizing him with an electric stun gun
and then smothering him -- was made to look so effectively like death from
natural causes that it fooled Dubai authorities for several days.

But although the Dubai police have made public much of the information they
have gathered, there are still unanswered questions.

For example, where did al-Mabhouh go for the several hours that he left the
hotel on the afternoon of Jan. 19?

There is speculation he met Iranian officials to arrange another shipment of
the missiles that Hamas regularly fires into Israel's towns and cities.

And then there's the matter of two Palestinians associated with the
intelligence and security operation of Fatah, Hamas' rival for political control
of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Ahmad Hasnin and Anwar Shekhaiber are reported by the Dubai police to have
arranged hired cars and hotel rooms in Dubai for the Mossad hit squad. And one
of them met chief assassin Elvinger.

They, too, escaped after al-Mabhouh's murder but have been extradited to
Dubai from Jordan.

So was this a joint Mossad-Fatah operation to decapitate Hamas?

In the Middle East anything is possible.

[email-masked]

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

The father of senior Hamas military commander Mahmoud
al-Mabhouh holds a picture of his son in the Gaza Strip Monday.

Photograph by: Mohammed Salem, Reuters, Vancouver
Sun