Tale of forged passports in Dubai killing case

Britain has declared its ‘outrage’ at the use of forged British passports by a hit squad that killed a Hamas official in Dubai, and dispatched police investigators to the Gulf emirate to collect evidence.

The officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) arrived in the UAE as the investigation focused increasingly on Israel. The Dubai police chief declared that he was “99 per cent, if not cent per cent certain” of Mossad’s involvement, and called on Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan. While SOCA is concentrating specifically on the misuse of British passports, it is understood that MI6 is conducting a broader, parallel probe into Israeli involvement.

Britain, Ireland and France stepped up diplomatic pressure on Israel, demanding explanations on the use of forged European passports by the assassins who targeted Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on January 19.

The US also looked likely to be drawn into the affair for the first time, after the ‘Wall Street Journal’ reported that Mabhouh’s assassins had used American-registered credit cards to buy plane tickets.

An outrage
The foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, had been asked to shed light on how the identities of six British citizens living in Israel had been stolen and used by the assassins. The foreign secretary said any tampering with British passports was ‘an outrage.’

Ireland’s foreign minister Michael Martin revealed that a further two Irish passports were used in the assassination, bringing the total number of Irish travel documents involved to five as speculation grew that the size of the hit squad was bigger than the 11 originally reported.

British diplomats in Israel have been meeting the six British nationals caught up in the assassination plot when their identities were used by the hit team. Foreign office officials said that none of the six had reported their passports stolen so the documents used by the killers appeared to be sophisticated clones. SOCA said the numbers on the fake passports were the same as the genuine ones. It confirmed the photographs and signatures on the passports used in Dubai do not match those on passports issued by British authorities.

Miliband is to meet in Brussels on Monday with his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, who has insisted there is no proof of Israeli involvement, and stressed that his government employed a ‘policy of ambiguity’ on intelligence matters.

In Dubai, however, the emirate’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim, called on local television for Interpol to issue “a red notice against the head of Mossad … as a killer in case Mossad is proved to be behind the crime, which is likely now.”

British officials said it was too early to speculate on what measures Britain might take against Israel if the government remained uncooperative.

One possible consequence could be Britain’s response to an Israeli request to change its ‘universal jurisdiction’ law on war crimes, under which a London magistrates court issued an arrest warrant in December for Israel’s former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for her role in the Gaza offensive a year earlier.

Livni cancelled her planned visit to London as a result, leading Miliband to promise the law would be changed.

However, there have been growing calls for the relationship to be reassessed if Israel is proved to have been involved in the forging of British passports in the Mabhouh assassination. Sir Richard Dalton, Britain’s ambassador to Iran from 2003 to 2006 said: “All this just says how pathetic and ludicrous the claim is that Israel is Britain’s strategic partner.”

David Cameron, a Conservative leader, said Israel must provide assurances it would ban Mossad from using UK travel papers.

The Dubai authorities said they had asked Britain for assistance at the end of January, but the foreign office insists it was only informed of the British connection hours before it was made public.