Dubai police appealed for an international manhunt yesterday after releasing names and photos of an alleged 11-member hit squad accused of stalking and killing a Hamas commander last month in a plot that mixed cold precision with spy caper disguises such as fake beards and wigs.
Dubai authorities said they would seek assistance from Interpol and press individual nations to hunt down the suspects in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, whose body was found on Jan. 20 in his luxury hotel room.
Dubai’s attorney general, Essam al-Hemaydan, said international arrest warrants have been issues for those accused of links to the slaying.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Police say the 10 men and one woman traveled to Dubai with European passports and killed al-Mabhouh less than 24 hours after their arrival.
Hamas has accused Israel’s Mossad secret service of masterminding the slaying and has vowed revenge.
Dubai’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim, did not directly implicate Israel at a news conference on Monday to announce new details about al-Mabhouh’s death.However, he noted the possibility that “leaders of certain countries gave orders to their intelligence agents to kill” al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’ military wing.
At least two Palestinians have been taken into custody in Dubai for alleged links to the slaying, said Adnan Damiri, the police spokesman in the West Bank, citing sources familiar with the investigation.
Damiri said the Palestinian suspects were Hamas operatives. Hamas, however, said the suspects were linked to the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as part of alleged clandestine links with Israeli intelligence.
Meanwhile, there was no comment from Dubai-based diplomats from the countries linked to passports carried by the alleged assassin cell: Six with British, three Irish and one each from France and Germany.
Dubai police claimed that four members of the alleged cell — three men identified as British and one Irish — carried out the killing. Five others, including the woman, were used as spotters and in other planning roles, police said. The mastermind was a man identified as French.
Tamim’s news conference attempted to create a full narrative of the plot — including surveillance video clips — from the suspects’ airport arrivals to their hasty departures before al-Mabhouh’s body was found at the al-Bustan Rotana Hotel near Dubai’s international airport.
Tamim’s account portrayed the suspects as operating with chilling efficiency — arriving in Dubai at different times, checking into different hotels and tailing al-Mabhouh from the moment of his arrival in Dubai to when he entered his hotel room.
Some of the suspects even rode in the same elevator as al-Mabhouh to verify his room number and later booked a room across the hall, Tamim said.
They paid for all expenses in cash and used different cellphone cards to avoid being traced, Tamim said.
In the surveillance footage, the female suspect appears to be wearing a wig and at times a big hat and sunglasses to blend in as a tourist. Others also were seen disguised as vacationers, wearing baseball caps or tennis outfits and carrying rackets.
Tamim also said some suspects donned fake beards.
He said forensic tests indicated al-Mabhouh died of suffocation, but lab analyses were still under way to pinpoint other possible factors in his death.
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