Mossad in hot seat over murder of Hamas man

[Scurrilous]

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"Mossad is in the hot seat on Wednesday over the murder of a top Hamas man in Dubai, as at least seven Israelis said their identities were stolen by the assassins, widely thought to be agents of the Jewish state's storied secret service.

The killing of top Hamas militant Mahmud al-Mabhuh while on a weapons purchasing trip to Dubai last month has widely been blamed on the Mossad, although no evidence has yet linked the agency, which in keeping with tradition has kept mum on the affair.

But suspicions deepened after Dubai this week released details of the case that at times seem to have come straight from the pages of a spy thriller.

Mabhuh was killed by a hit squad of 11 Europeans -- six from Britain, three from Ireland, one from Germany and one from France -- with all but Berlin saying the passports had been faked.

A senior British lawmaker on Wednesday called for Israel's ambassador to be summoned over the affair."

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UK probes fake passports in Hamas killing

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3850659,00.html

British PM Brown pledges 'full investigation' into how fake British passports were linked to killers of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. 'We are looking at this at this very moment," he notes, day after Britain says it believes six British passports held by members of 11-member hit team were fraudulent

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"British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged a "full investigation" Wednesday into how fake British passports were linked to the killers of a Hamas chief, amid calls here for Israel to explain its role.

"We are looking at this at this very moment," he told London's LBC radio, a day after Britain said it believed six British passports held by members of an 11-member hit team which killed Mahmud al-Mabhouh were fraudulent.

"We have got to carry out a full investigation into this. The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care," he told London's LBC Radio.

"The evidence has got to be assembled about what has actually happened and how it happened and why it happened and it is necessary for us to accumulate that evidence before we can make statements."



Following alleged Dubai mess, the Mossad chief must go

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"An important figure with many followers goes overboard and gets exiled to a faraway village in the north. That creative solution comes courtesy of the rabbinical forum "Takana." But the sanction meted out to Rabbi Mordechai Elon should also be applied to another gentleman, who anyway already resides in the north: Maj. Gen. (ret.) Meir Dagan, the belligerent, heavy-handed chief of the Mossad.

The State of Israel did not claim responsibility for the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The entire matter is treated as AFMR - According to Foreign Media Reports. We can still argue both sides of the broader issue at hand: assassinating senior officials in hotels (see under Rehavam Ze'evi) and in public (Imad Mughniyeh, Fathi Shkaki, Abbas Mussawi, Ali Hassan Salameh, and the list goes on). But we could also narrow the question to the quality of the performance in Dubai. And what must have seemed to its perpetrators as a huge success is now being overshadowed by enormous question marks.

If the perpetrators were from the Mossad (AFMR, of course), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be walking around with an acute sense of deja vu. Once again, an assassination of a senior Hamas leader in a friendly Arab country; once again, an operation designed to kill someone quietly and inconspicuously; once again, a diplomatic mess; and once again, it is all happening on Netanyahu's watch. In 1997, it was Khaled Meshal in Jordan. This time, it's Mabhouh in Dubai.

The anticipated diplomatic crisis is not, so far, with Dubai, but with the countries whose passports were used by the assassins. The United Kingdom and Ireland were used once again, and this time, a French connection topped it off. It is as if Israeli governments had never apologized to London for using British documentation; as if they had not promised solemnly, when passports of Her Majesty's subjects were found in a certain phone booth, that this would never happen again.

This time, they didn't mess with feisty New Zealand. But other countries also do not tend to be forgiving of such insolent violations of their sovereignty. Italy, for instance, has engaged for the last few years in a merciless attack on the CIA, which abducted a suspected Egyptian terrorist on Italian soil (Mordechai Vanunu's abduction came decades too early), as well as on its own intelligence agencies, which assisted the American one. As soon as the abducted man's wife filed a complaint, the Italian judiciary ruled that it could not possibly avoid investigating and pressing charges. In Italy, like in Dubai, meticulous work was invested in collecting evidence against the suspects, mostly by going through cellular communications data and tracing credit card trails in hotels and other businesses."

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