Raymond Barrett

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett in Washington

The fallout over the murder of a senior Hamas commander in Dubai continued last week as the city’s police chief said the head of Mossad – Israel’s intelligence service – should be arrested.

CCTV footage released by the Dubai authorities revealed that 11 people travelling on forged Irish, British, French and German passports tracked Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to the luxury Al Bustan Rotana hotel last month.

Al-Mabhouh was debilitated with a stun gun and then smothered to death in his room.

The killers flew out of Dubai to various European destinations within 24 hours of the assassination.

While concrete evidence has yet to emerge, Dubai’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim, was unambiguous in revealing the chief suspect believed to be behind the killing.

‘‘Investigations reveal that Mossad is involved,” he said. ‘‘It is 99 per cent, if not 100 per cent, certain that Mossad is standing behind the murder.”

While Israel rarely claims responsibility for such extra-judicial killings, it certainly has previous form in such matters.

In the years following the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Mossad assassinated a number of Palestinians across Europe, including at least one innocent man who was misidentified.

More recently, Hamas leaders in Jordan and Syria also have been targeted for assassination.

The use of forged passports (two assassins who entered Jordan in 1997 posed as Canadian tourists) is necessary as Israeli passport holders are generally not allowed to enter Arab countries.

While the Dubai murder itself was reminiscent of a spy thriller, the location and background to the killing has led to even further conjecture, much of it rife with political intrigue.

Dubai has long been a freewheeling haven where those who operate in the shadows of the global economy – such as arms dealers and those seeking to evade international sanctions – can do business.

The Persian Gulf city is the place through which Iran deals (and banks) with the rest of the world, and the possibility that al-Mahbouh was in the city arranging an arms shipment has been widely reported. Israel has long accused the Iranian government of supplying weapons to Hamas.

But the arrest of two Palestinians living in Dubai over alleged collaboration with the killers has also fuelled speculation that elements of Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, may have been involved. The Palestinian movement is currently split in two – Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza and there is deep-seated enmity between the two groups.

Ireland’s foreign affairs minister Micheál Martin stated last week that the government ‘‘takes grave exception to the forgery and misuse of Irish passports’’, but this is not the first incident to damage relations between Ireland and Israel.

When two Irish UN peacekeepers, Thomas Barrett and Derek Smallhorne, were kidnapped and shot dead in southern Lebanon by a Christian militia group in 1980, an Israeli military officer was allegedly present during their murder.