Murder in Dubai: the finger points to Mossad

video: dubaisession.

The so-called 'quiet' assassination of the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his Dubai hotel room last month is having wider consequences than even the assassins and their directors might have realised.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a full investigation into how five fake British passports were used by the killers, and how they stole the identities of five men with dual British-Israeli citizenship.
The method of operation, down to the fake passports and stolen identities, points to Mossad, the foreign intelligence organisation of the state of Israel.

You can read the rest of Robert Fox's First Post piece here.

Meanwhile, even 'Neo' Con Coughlin has written a piece entitled 'Israel must come clean over its involvement in the Dubai murder plot’.

Is this, like their invasion of Gaza, another big p.r. disaster for Israel?

Only time will tell.

UPDATE: Mehdi Hasan makes a good point over at the NS.

Let me ask you this: can you imagine the reaction if members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard were suspected of assassinating an Iranian dissident living abroad in Dubai, or an Israeli politician or general visiting a foreign country?

Well, I think we can be fairly sure that Melanie Phillips would have written about it by now.

FURTHER UPDATE:

Seumas Milne writes:

Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if ­Iranian ­intelligence was almost ­unversally believed to have ­assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state. Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the ­operation ­using forged or stolen passports of ­citizens of four European states, including Britain, with dual Iranian nationality.

You can be sure it would have ­triggered a major international storm, stentorian declarations about the threat of state-sponsored terrorism, and ­perhaps a debate at the UN ­security council, with demands for harsher ­sanctions against an increasingly ­dangerous Islamic republic.

Substitute Israel for Iran, and the first part of that scenario is exactly what happened in Dubai last month.

But instead of setting off a diplomatic backlash, the British government sat on its hands for almost a week after it was reportedly first passed details of the passport abuse. And while the Foreign Office finally summoned the Israeli ambassador to "share information", rather than protest, Gordon Brown could ­yesterday only promise a "full investigation".

You can read the whole of the article here.