Britons shocked by Dubai assassination claims
Updated on 17 February 2010
Gordon Brown promises a full investigation into the use of fake British passports by the assassins of a Hamas chief in Dubai. Alex Thomson reports.
British authorities are investigating claims of how six British nationals apparently had their passports cloned by assassins, alleged to be from a Mossad squad, on a reported mission to kill a top Hamas leader.
Police in Dubai named 11 suspects - all carrying European credentials - who were allegedly part of a plot to kill military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, which was orchestrated from a command centre in Austria.
The leader from the Palestinian group Hamas was found dead in a luxury Dubai hotel room last month amid conflicting reports over how he was killed.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office confirmed that the identities of the six accused are real British passport holders living in Israel.
"We believe the passports were used fraudulently and have begun our own investigation," a spokesman said.
One of the British suspects denied any involvement in the killing, calling himself the victim of an identity theft.
"I am obviously angry, upset and scared," Melvyn Adam Mildiner, a British immigrant to Israel, said.
Mildiner of Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem, said he had nothing to do with the assassination and had never been to Dubai.
"I don't know how this happened or who chose my name or why, but hopefully we'll find out soon," said Mildiner, a technical writer after Israeli newspapers splashed names and photos of the suspects distributed in Dubai.
"I have my passport. It is in my house, along with the passports of everybody else in my family, and there's no Dubai stamps in it because I've never been to Dubai," Mildiner said.
Five of the 11 European passport holders named by Dubai police.
Three other men on Dubai's list offered similar accounts to Israeli television stations and websites. Most shared a profile of having immigrated to Israel from English-speaking countries and had dual national identities.
"I don't know what to say. It's a mistaken or stolen identity, it's not me, that's for sure," Michael Lawrence Barney said in a televised interview.
Stephen Hodes, another recent immigrant to the Jewish state, said: "I am in total shock. I don't know how they reached me. The photographs are not of me, of course...I'm mortified."
Prime Minister Gordon Brown today promised full investigation. "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."
The Palestinian militant group Hamas has blamed Israel for the assassination that took place in a luxury hotel in the Gulf emirate, and Dubai police have said they could not rule out Israeli involvement.
Israel's foreign minister has said that the use of identities of foreign-born Israelis did not prove the Mossad spy agency assassinated him.
"There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad, and not some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief," Avigdor Lieberman told Army Radio.
Amir Oren, from Haaretz newspaper in Tel Aviv, has told Channel 4 News: If we go with foreign minister Lieberman's insistence that Israel remain ambiguous about it - presumably to get some deterrants out of the assumption that Israel did it - we can assume without any confirmation that Israel may indeed have been involved in this matter.
"If we proceed from this assumption, then, apparently, it was intended to be a silent operation, so to speak, meant to portray the late Mr M as having suffered a heart attack and then collapsed in his room behind closed doors, and then found dead of natural causes.
"In that case there would have been no investigation and no tracing back of any assassination squad.
"Only when suspicion arose in Dubai, only then were the identities and passports and photos depicted in a way that is now seen in Israel as a blunder.
He added: "There has been a remarkable shift in public opinion over the last 24 hours.
"At first when the Dubai police showed their remarkable Oceans Eleven sort of film regarding the hit, the Israeli public applauded the professionalism displayed by the presumably Israeli squad, but then when it turned out that these identities were, if not stolen, at least borrowed and then returned to the innocent people involved, then questions emerged.
"As we speak now, while the Israelis believe that it is right for Israel to go after Hamas terrorists such as M, nevertheless it wasn't necessarily cost effective."
Dubai police said the killers were disguised in wigs, hats, sunglasses and tennis outfits and used an electronic device to break into Mabhou's hotel room and lie in wait for their target.
Police released CCTV footage showing some of the suspects going in and out of the al Bustan Rotana hotel, where the victim was staying.
Dubai's police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim told reporters that the suspects arrived in Dubai at different times, checked into separate hotels and tailed al-Mabhouh from the moment of his arrival.
They paid for all expenses in cash and used cell phone cards to avoid being traced while calling a "command centre" in Austria police said.
Hit squads dispatched by Israel's Mossad spy agency have used foreign passports in the past, notably in 1997 when agents entered Jordan on Canadian passports and bungled an attempt to kill Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal with poison.
In the most recent publicised case linking Mossad to foreign identity papers, two suspected Israeli agents were jailed in New Zealand in 2005 for obtaining that country's passports illegally.
In 1987, Britain protested to Israel about what London called the misuse by Israeli authorities of forged British passports and said it received assurances steps had been taken to prevent future occurrences.
