Dubai Police/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A composite image showing the passport photographs of 11 people suspected of traveling to Dubai using fake European passports last month and taking part in the assassination of a Hamas official.Updated, 4:19 p.m. | As Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, prepared to meet his British and Irish counterparts on Monday, press reports from Britain and Germany linked Israelis to the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai last month.
Three British newspapers, citing anonymous sources, reported in recent days that Israeli officials were involved in the plot to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader, in a luxury hotel in Dubai on Jan. 19. According to a German magazine, one of the men suspected of taking part in the assassination had traveled to Dubai using a real passport, obtained last year by a man who claimed to be an Israeli citizen whose family had been forced to flee Nazi Germany.
Writing in London’s Sunday Times, Uzi Mahnaimi reported that “sources with knowledge of Mossad,” the Israeli intelligence service, said that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the operation to kill Mr. Mabhouh after being briefed on the plan in January at the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv.
On Saturday, Melissa Kite, the deputy political editor of London’s Telegraph newspaper, reported that unnamed “diplomatic sources” said that government officials in Britain were told that “Israeli immigration officials at Tel Aviv airport secretly copied the British passports which were then used by the hit squad.”
Ms. Kite’s sources told her that “the six British citizens whose identities were stolen and used by the killers all had their passports taken away from them briefly during routine checks at the airport,” in Israel. All six of the British nationals whose names and passport numbers were used on fake documents carried by suspects identified by investigators in Dubai currently live in Israel.
According to Ms. Kite’s sources, officials in the British Foreign Office were told in a briefing about the copying of the British passports in Tel Aviv, but The Guardian reported that a spokesman for the Foreign Office disputed The Telegrah’s report.
On Friday, the British government also took issue with a report in another newspaper, The Daily Mail, which claimed that the British intelligence service MI6 had been informed before the assassination that British passports would be used in a Mossad operation. According to The Mail’s report, which also relied on anonymous sources, an unnamed “British security source” said “a serving member of Israeli intelligence” had told him that “the British Government was told very, very briefly before the operation what was going to happen. There was no British involvement and they didn’t know the name of the target. But they were told these people were traveling on UK passports.”
Ian Black of The Guardian reported on Friday that British government officials had dismissed The Mail’s report as “nonsense” and claimed that it was based on a briefing from a pro-Israel source involved in an effort to deflect blame from Israel by suggesting British complicity in the assassination. A spokesman for the British Foreign Office told The Guardian: “Any suggestion that the government knew anything about the murder before it happened is completely untrue, including the use of U.K. passports.”
On Saturday, Germany’s Spiegel magazine reported that one of the suspected assassins, who used the name Michael Bodenheimer, had obtained a genuine German passport in 2009 after presenting paperwork, including an Israeli passport in that name, which he said proved that his Jewish grandparents had been forced to flee Cologne by the Nazis.
As Yossi Melman, an expert on the Mossad, explained in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, this case also seems to involve identity theft. The real Michael Bodenheimer is an Israeli citizen who moved to Israel from the United States.
Mr. Melman reminded readers last week that Mossad agents have used foreign passports in the past:
Agent Sylvia Rafael, from South Africa, was arrested in an assassination attempt in Norway that ended in tragedy, as a result of the mistaken identity of a Moroccan waiter in July 1973. She was traveling with the forged identity of a Canadian photographer by the name of Patricia Roxburgh. Her colleagues on that mission were arrested with the forged or borrowed identities of British and French citizens. […]
In 1997, Mossad agents were arrested in Jordan following the failed attempt on the life of Hamas politburo leader Khaled Meshal. They were carrying Canadian passports. Following that incident, Ottawa demanded clarifications from Israel and received promises that Canadian passports would not be used in future operations.
It turned out that at least one of the passports belonged to a Jewish Canadian who had arrived in Israel to study and said that certain people contacted him and asked to make use of his passport for a short period of time in the service of the State of Israel. He later denied this version of events, claiming the passport had been taken without his consent.
Several years later, two Mossad agents were arrested in New Zealand attempting to acquire real passports using the name of a local quadriplegic youth, who was highly unlikely to apply for a passport to leave the country. In this case, too, Israel was forced to apologize and promised not to violate the sovereignty of New Zealand in the future.
In an interview published on Sunday in Le Journal du Dimanche, a French newspaper, Bernard Kouchner said that the single French passport used by in Dubai was a fake that did not involve identity theft.
On Saturday The Irish Times reported that five Irish citizens may have had their passport numbers stolen as part of the Dubai operation, not just three as initially reported. Ireland’s foreign minister, Micheál Martin, told the Irish newspaper that he had asked to meet his Israeli counterpart on Monday because, “There has been a lot of speculation out there that there may have been Mossad involvement. We don’t have any cast-iron proof of anything but we will see if [he] can shed any light on this and give any clarification and give his perspective.”
Update: Thanks to a reader who points out that a new blog post by Batsheva Sobelman of The Los Angeles Times has more information on the investigation by German and Israeli journalists into the identity of the suspect who used a German passport to travel to and from Dubai last month. Ms. Sobleman writes that Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist, told Israel Army radio on Monday he had found traces of the man who used the name Michael Bodenheimer to obtain the German passport in an Israeli town. Summarizing Mr. Bergamn’s radio interview, Ms. Sobelman wrote:
A man walked in to the interior ministry in Cologne, Germany on June 16, 2009, and claimed that he was Michael Bodenheimer, an Israeli citizen, descended of a German family that had been persecuted by the Nazis. He applied for German citizenship, saying he wished to leave Israel and emigrate to Germany. He presented documents, including his parents’ German marriage certificate, said he lived in the community of Liman and also gave an address in Herzliya.
The documents must have been convincingly authentic, and two days later, in a model of bureaucratic efficiency that seems atypical (even for Germany), the passport had been issued. The photograph on the passport is the one now in the papers as one of the assassins, but it is most definitely not that of the Michael Bodenheimer who does live somewhere else in Israel. […]
The new Bodenheimer gave an address in Herzliya. Bergman said the German authorities didn’t check it out. But had they done so, they would have found that he had an apparent shell company in his name with offices in Herzliya. “Michael Bodenheimer Ltd.” belonged to a group of offices opened by a different company called “Top Office” located on the same floor. Top Office, says Bergman, is apparently a company that provides individuals and small businesses with an office and secretary at a respectable location.
Bergman said he paid the business address a visit on Friday night, together with the Der Spiegel correspondent in Israel, he told the radio. He took a picture of the sign saying “Michael Bodenheimer Ltd,” and called the number for Top Office. An American-accented woman answered, sounded very surprised and hung up after saying she didn’t work on the Sabbath. By Sunday morning, says Bergman, both companies were gone. The signs had been removed.