http://business.maktoob.com/20090000436238/0/PrintPage.htm

 Dubai to issue 11 warrants in Hamas killing
Feb 15, 2010 at 20:55

UPDATE 2: Dubai to issue arrest warrants soon for 11 Europeans
suspected in killing of senior Hamas official.

DUBAI - Police are hunting 11 suspects with European passports,
including a woman, for the murder in a Dubai hotel room of a top
militant of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, the Gulf emirate's
police chief said on Monday.

The hit team which killed Mahmud al-Mabhuh last month was made up of
six British passport holders, three with Irish passports, including
the woman, and the holders of a German and a French passport, Dhafi
Khalfan said.

"We have no doubts that it was 11 people holding these passports, and
we regret that they used the travel documents of friendly countries,"
he told a press conference, describing a rapid and professional hit.

While not ruling out "the involvement of (Israel's spy agency) Mossad
or other parties in the assassination," Khalfan said the names on the
passports had been passed on to Interpol to request arrest warrants.

Britain's Foreign Office had no comment about the accusation, while
its counterpart in Ireland said Irish diplomats were seeking
clarification.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, has accused Israel of killing
Mabhuh, 50, who was found dead in his luxury hotel room in Dubai on
January 20 and vowed revenge.

Its members have said that Mabhuh, who was based in Damascus, was on a
visit to Dubai to buy weapons for the militant group's armed wing of
which he was a founder.

Mabhuh, who was born in northern Gaza, confessed to his involvement in
the 1989 killings of two captured Israeli soldiers, in a video aired
more than two weeks after his death.

According to Khalfan, Mabhuh entered the United Arab Emirates, of
which Dubai is a member, a day before his death using a passport that
did not bear his family name.

He was then tracked by his killers who had reserved a room across the
hall from his in the hotel, according to Khalfan.

The killers tried to force open his door but it was unclear whether
they managed to enter or waited until he opened it for them.

"He was strangled after receiving maybe an electric shock," said the
police chief, denying media reports that the Hamas militant had come
to Dubai on a mission to buy arms from Iran.

Mabhuh's killers had left Dubai in the hours following the murder,
said Khalfan, presenting the media surveillance camera footage of the
team arriving and departing and their movements in the hotel.

The police chief added the group spent only 24 hours in Dubai, and
that the killers used no weapons, credit cards or local phone lines
during their stay.

Khalfan had harsh words for both the killers, who had needed a
10-member team against a sole unarmed person, and their victim, who
had killed the captured soldiers.

Amid official silence in the Jewish state, Israeli newspapers have
hailed the killing, with the rightwing Jerusalem Post calling it
"another blow to the 'axis of evil.'"

According to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper, citing unidentified
Middle East sources, Mabhuh on arrival in Dubai was followed by two
men described by local police as "Europeans carrying European
passports."

The hit squad injected Mabhuh with a drug that induced a heart attack,
photographed all the documents in his briefcase, and left a "do not
disturb" sign on the door, it said.

Over the years, a number of Hamas leaders have died in what Israel
calls "targeted killings."

In 2004, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed in an Israeli
helicopter gunship attack in Gaza. One month later, another Hamas
leader in the enclave, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, was killed when two
missiles hit his car.

In 1997, Israeli agents tried to poison Hamas' exiled political
supremo Khaled Meshaal in Amman..

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