Dubai: It took at least 26 people, five types of passports, 17 credit cards, 56 flights and about half a dozen hotel stays to kill one Hamas commander.
While the kill was successful, the information that Dubai Police has been releasing drop by drop has continued to shock observers. The new information released yesterday by Dubai Police shows a new video with new CCTV angles, new people and new nationalities.
Click here to know how the suspects are connected (pdf)
Most shockingly, perhaps, it reveals that two of the Australian operatives, widely believed to be employed by Israel's spy agency Mossad, paid a visit to Israel's arch enemy Iran in the planning stages of the operation in 2009.
The video also indicates that something could have gone wrong in the operation. At one stage, a blonde Irish passport holder, Anna Shauan Clasby, appears to call off her assignment and take a flight back to Zurich, where she came from. Dubai Police do not say why.
Another cell, consisting of Irish passport holders Ivy Brinton and Chester Halvey, were revealed, too. Dubai Police said it had footage of their movements earlier but did not release it "for the sake of the investigation". Their task in the operation, Dubai Police believes, was to "connect the squad to a foreign communications network". The two are seen in two different disguises in the footage.
Joshua Daniel Bruce, another addition, seems to have been part of a second "tennis cell". His task was to determine the victim's hotel room, and is seen wandering in his tennis outfit.
It appears that, if this is indeed the work of Mossad, and that some if not most of the identities were stolen from Israelis with dual nationality, that Mossad was careful not to steal identities of those with conspicuously Jewish names.
New names
Jews immigrating to Israel are asked to take new, Hebrew names. Most tend to take that option. Some of the French and Irish names of the assassins who were revealed would not be mistaken to be Israeli.
Whether the newly revealed identities were stolen will be determined when Israel wakes up to the news today. Britain and Ireland have already confirmed that every passport used from their countries was a stolen identity.
Dubai Police's insistence that 23 of the 26 passports were original brings into question claims of innocence by those whose identities are claimed to have been stolen. It is said that the Mossad has an army of civilian volunteers who volunteer to serve the Israeli cause. According to Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, a book on Mossad, the number of such volunteers around the world is between 500,000 and a million.
If the identities were indeed voluntarily given to the Mossad, the possibility of the secrecy of the plan going so horribly wrong was obviously not considered.
