Dubai seeks '11 Europeans' for Hamas killing

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/...odayspaper

Dubai police officials are investigating at least four United States-issued credit card accounts, which they say the suspects obtained with the passports they used to travel to Dubai. The police say the suspects used the accounts to purchase plane tickets and other items related to the assassination, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

I don't think it is easy for anybody to get a US credit card account on just a foreign passport without any credit history. But maybe they had a little help from a three letter agency...

[David Guyatt]

Providing legends for agents always include passports and credit cards. I don't know how its done, but fabricating an identity - or in this case stealing identities - seems to be run of the mill stuff for spookdom.

[Magda Hassan]

And witness protection. Which is quite a bit bigger than thought too. Crosses over with spookdom in many cases.

[David Guyatt]

Ho hum.

Does one get the impression that some politically inspired nasty stuff is going on in an election year? Killing two birds with one stone, perhaps. It's starting to seem like a set-up to me.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnew...rrer=yahoo

Did Britain know about Mossad hit? Israeli agent claims MI6 was tipped off

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 9:05 AM on 19th February 2010

Agent claims MI5 and Foreign Office were tipped off

David Miliband vows to 'get to the bottom' of affair

Gordon Brown promises an inquiry into identity theft

Dubai police chief calls for arrest of Mossad head

Hamas promises retaliation against Israel

MI6 was tipped off that Israeli agents were going to carry out an 'overseas operation' using fake British passports, it was claimed last night.

A member of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, said the Foreign Office was also told hours before a Hamas terrorist chief was assassinated in Dubai.

The tip-off did not say who the target would be or even where the hit squad would be in action.

But the claim from a credible source that the Government had some prior knowledge of the abuse of UK passports will strengthen calls for ministers to come clean about what they knew and when.

It came as more details emerged of how Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was lured into a trap by Palestinian double agents last month before being smothered with a pillow.

The killers tried to make his death look like an accident.

A British security source who met the Mossad agent, and has a track record of providing reliable information, told the Daily Mail: 'This is a serving member of Israeli intelligence.

'He says the British Government was told very, very briefly before the operation what was going to happen. There was no British involvement and they didn't know the name of the target. But they were told these people were travelling on UK passports.'

The security source said that the tip-off was not a request for permission to use British passports but more a 'courtesy call' to let the security services know 'a situation' might blow up.

The Mossad man said Israeli intelligence chiefs understand British authorities will have to 'slap them on the wrist' and added: 'The British government has to be seen to be going through the motions.'

The Israeli's claims contradict Foreign Office assertions that the UK knew nothing of the affair until shortly before the Dubai authorities went public over the assassination earlier this week.

However officials in the Gulf state have claimed that British ministers may have been alerted by Dubai last month about the use of the passports.

If MI6 received a tip-off from Mossad it is not certain it would have been passed to Foreign Secretary David Miliband, particularly if it was vague.

Intelligence officers may have preferred to wait before alerting ministers. But any suggestion that officials turned a blind eye to an extra-judicial killing will strengthen calls for a public inquiry into the UK's involvement in the war on terrorism.

Judges have already ruled that British spies have been complicit in the torture of terrorist suspects.

It will also fuel suspicions in some Arab countries that Britain was 'complicit' in the killing of al-Mabhouh.

A Foreign Office spokesman insisted last night it was 'not correct' to claim that Britain knew in advance about the passports.

He said: 'We received the details of the British passports a few hours before the press conference [by police in Dubai]. We were able to respond to the Dubai authorities on the authenticity of the passports the next day.'

The British source told the Mail he has known the Mossad man for more than 20 years and they met as part of a longstanding arrangement.

He said British-Israeli intelligence relations were 'jogging along very nicely when nobody knew - then it all became public'.

The Israeli agent rejected suggestions that intelligence-sharing between the two nations might be damaged.

He said Mossad was handling several sources within the UK Muslim community and added: 'There is no question of jeopardising that information flow.'

The revelation of a 'tip-off' came after Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor was 'invited' to the Foreign Office and asked to co-operate fully with the inquiry into the forged passports by the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

A senior government official told the Mail: 'We asked the Israelis toco-operate fully and that's where we left it. We asked some tough questions.'
The official added: 'The Israeli ambassador didn't say a great deal.'

As he left the Foreign Office, a relaxed Mr Prosor denied there was any 'additional information' to give.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband branded the abuse of ID documents 'outrageous' and demanded that Tel Aviv co-operate fully.

His shadow William Hague demanded 'fuller' answers about when the Foreign Office knew of the 'cloned' passports.

The row came as more details of the plot to kill the Hamas leader were disclosed.

Intelligence sources say al-Mabhouh was lured to a meeting in Dubai by two men who had worked with him in Hamas in Gaza.

He did not realise they had defected to the more moderate Fatah, bitter enemies of Hamas, and were secretly working with the Israelis.

Two Palestinian men are in custody in Dubai. The director of the Dubai Police forensic medicine department revealed yesterday that finding the cause of al-Mabhouh's death had been the most difficult post mortem he had ever done.

British-trained Dr Fawzi Benomran said the killers had put his body in bed and covered it, to make it appear he had died in his sleep.

But he and his team established that death was caused by 'suffocation by smothering, most probably with a pillow'.

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Providing legends for agents always include passports and credit cards. I don't know how its done, but fabricating an identity - or in this case stealing identities - seems to be run of the mill stuff for spookdom.

True, but I still consider it significant that they used US credit cards for allegedly 'European' identities, allegedly using the forged passports to open the accounts. I don't find that plausible, but maybe this is an artefact of translation or simply false information. But I would be interested in the billing addresses of the accounts in question.

[Magda Hassan]

Providing legends for agents always include passports and credit cards. I don't know how its done, but fabricating an identity - or in this case stealing identities - seems to be run of the mill stuff for spookdom.

True, but I still consider it significant that they used US credit cards for allegedly 'European' identities, allegedly using the forged passports to open the accounts. I don't find that plausible, but maybe this is an artefact of translation or simply false information. But I would be interested in the billing addresses of the accounts in question.

Mastercard, Visa, and Diners Club and Amex are all US companies is this what you mean?

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Mastercard, Visa, and Diners Club and Amex are all US companies is this what you mean?

The article I quoted said "US-issued". It is not clear what that means. Of course there is no mystery, if the cards were issued in Europe on behalf of an American bank or Credit Card organisation.

[Ed Jewett]

Special Reports
Israeli kiosk vendors at malls in U.S. disappearing
By Wayne Madsen

(WMR) -- Israeli mall kiosk vendors, identified by the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. counter-intelligence agencies as part of an Israeli intelligence-gathering operation in the United States, have started to abandon their kiosks in malls across the United States, according to information received by WMR.
Feb 19, 2010, 00:20

[David Guyatt]

This one keeps running and running...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb...CMP=AFCYAH

Britain denies any advance warning of plan to murder Hamas leader
Whitehall angry at 'Israeli effort to deflect blame' via report saying UK knew of impending plot
Ian Black
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 February 2010 20.18 GMT
larger | smaller
Britain has flatly denied any foreknowledge of a Mossad plan to assassinate a top official of the Palestinian group Hamas, in Dubai, amidst angry accusations in Whitehall that Israel is seeking to deflect blame from itself by implicating others.

British government sources dismissed as "nonsense" a report claiming the Israeli secret service had given the UK advanced warning of possible complications arising from the illicit use of British passports in an unspecified "overseas operation" – the murder of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Officials complained of misleading briefing, apparently by pro-Israeli sources, reflected in a report in Friday's Daily Mail, which claimed that the Foreign Office was told, albeit only in general terms, of an impending assassination. The Mail story was widely reported today, both in Israel and across the Arab world.

"Any suggestion that the government knew anything about the murder before it happened is completely untrue, including the use of UK passports," insisted a FCO spokesman.

On Thursday David Miliband, the foreign secretary, described the seeming fraudulent use of cloned British passports as "outrageous." Miliband is to meet his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, in Brussels on Monday. No UK action is likely until the completion of an investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

But if Israeli official involvement were proved Britain would, at the very least, expect a public apology and guarantees that passports would not be stolen again. A more extreme option could be expelling diplomats from Israel's London embassy.

Israeli media reports, meanwhile, told of the apparent disappearance of one of the six people with dual British-Israeli nationality whose names were released by the Dubai authorities as suspects in the killing of Mabhouh last month. The man, James Clarke, a Briton who converted to Judaism, was said by residents of Kibbutz Givat Ha'shlosha, in central Israel, to have gone into hiding. Clarke originally went to the kibbutz as a volunteer, married an Israeli woman and served in the Israeli army as a bomb disposal expert. Neighbours told the Maariv newspaper that his family had asked them not to speak to the media.

British embassy staff in Tel Aviv said they had tracked down five of the six and invited them to get new passports in place of the ones the Dubai police publicised. The names and numbers on the original British passports are the same as those used by the alleged agents. "This step will reduce the risk that these people might be inadvertently detained," said an embassy spokesman, Raffi Shamir.

Rival Palestinian factions, meanwhile, continued to trade accusations about involvement in the Dubai killing. Hamas named two Palestinians under arrest in the emirate as Anwar Sheibar and Ahmad Hassanein, former Gazan members of Fatah's security forces with links to the senior Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan. Al-Hayat, the London-based Arabic daily, quoted an unnamed Hamas official as saying that the two had provided logistical aid to the alleged Mossad team.

Dahlan denied knowing the two men or involvement in the affair, saying Hamas was "following mirages created by Israel".

Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli commentator writing in Haaretz newspaper, called Mabhouh "a central cog in the weapons smuggling trail … from Iran to Gaza", the assassination "a mortal blow to Hamas".

Interpol said Thursday it had issued "red notices" for the 11 suspects. Dubai's police chief has said he believes Israeli agents are responsible for the killing.

The Mossad

The Mossad is Israel's equivalent of the CIA or Britain's MI6. Its full name is the Institute for Espionage and Special Operations. The Hebrew word "mossad" simply means "institute", so it has come to be known as "the Mossad". The definite article distinguishes it from other more mundane Israeli institutes. Meir Dagan, the Mossad's director for the past seven years, says on its website: "People enrolling in the Mossad join generations of anonymous and dedicated fighters and intelligence officers who are loyal and devoted to their people and country."

[Peter Presland]

There's an interesting take on the 'UK was forewarned by Israel' and the provenance of the passports used over at 'Pulse Media'

Robert Fisk in the Independant has done some sterling reporting on this too and there is a must-watch al-Jazeera video interview with him on the same Pulse media page.

The suggestion is that the UK WERE forewarned, but only hours before the event and NOT about the passports, as a way of crippling any otherwise genuine hard-line response. After all, if the UK were to admit it was forewarned it would look pretty stupid. So, having now stated that it wasn't forewarned, it risks the Israelis revealing that it was if there is serious follow-through on making life difficult for them. Clever eh? - or maybe just a bit too bloody clever.

The UK can go through the motions so long as all of that is clearly understood - and Robert Fisk judges that is what will happen - Israel - yet again will be given a free pass.

OTOH, there do seem to be masses of loose ends. Real European passports used with impunity! ??? Where does that leave protection of EU citizens?. And if the passports were taken from unsuspecting immigrants to Israel, what does that do for the confidence of prospective immigrants?

Also, the Dubai police do appear genuinely pissed off. It will be interesting to watch how that squares with the dependence of its government for its very existence on US military guarantees.

One thing I do take from it is Israel's increasing desperation. There don't seem to be too many people marvelling at how brave and clever their murderous Mossad operatives are anymore either.