By Agencies

Share Link:

Israel's foreign minister has said there is "no reason" to believe that his country's spy agency was behind the killing of a senior Hamas figure in the United Arab Emirates, but did not explicitly deny involvement.

Hamas has blamed Israel for the murder in a Dubai hotel room last month and the emirate's police force has refused to rule out the possibility that the 11 suspects wanted by investigators were working for Mossad.

Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, told Army Radio on Wednesday: "There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad, and not some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief.

However, he also said that Israel has a "policy of ambiguity" on intelligence matters.

 Dubai police have said that at least seven of the 11 members of the gang suspected of carrying out the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh share names with foreign-born Israelis.

'Like an espionage story'

Six of the men are Britons who immigrated to Israel. The seventh is an American-Israeli, whose name Dubai said was on a German passport used by one of the assassins.

But the Israelis have insisted that their identities were stolen and said the passport pictures were not a match.

Paul John Keally, an Israeli-British citizen whose identity was apparently used by one of the group, said his life has become "like an espionage movie".

"It is all very worrying but I know I have not done anything wrong," he was quoted as saying by Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.

The wife of Stephen Hodes, another British-Israeli living west of Jerusalem, told Israeli paper Maariv: "It started like a story that made us laugh, but now we don't know how to take it."

British and Irish official said on Tuesday that they had examined the details of the nine suspects' passports purportedly issued by the two countries and said they believed they were fake.

Counterfeit passports

Claims that Mossad may have counterfeited UK passports to allow Israeli agents to operate abroad triggered speculation that diplomatic relations between Britain and Israel could be harmed, but Lieberman said that was unlikely.

"I think Britain recognises that Israel is a responsible country and that our security activity is conducted according to very clear, cautious and responsible rules of the game"

Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli foreign minister

"I think Britain recognises that Israel is a responsible country and that our security activity is conducted according to very clear, cautious and responsible rules of the game," he said.

"Therefore we have no cause for concern."

Mossad hit squads have used foreign passports in the past, most notably in 1997 when agents entered Jordan on Canadian passports and bungled an attempt to kill Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader, with poison.

In 1987, Britain protested to Israel about what London called the misuse by Israeli authorities of forged British passports and said it received assurances steps had been taken to prevent future occurrences.

French and Austrian authorities have begun investigations related to the suspected hit squad.

A source close to the French intelligence services told the Reuters news agency that a French passport used by one of those being hunted had a valid number but incorrect name.

Pre-paid phones

Austria's interior ministry said it had launched an investigation into the suspected use of at least seven mobile phones with pre-paid Austrian chips by the suspects.

The group of assassins were believed to have rented a room across the corridor from al-Mabhouh around the time of the murder, spending just 24 hours in Dubai without using credit cards or local phone lines, Dubai's police chief has said.

Authorities appear to have linked the group through videos which show them entering and exiting the hotel, standing together in the hotel lobby and going in and out of the elevator on the floor where al-Mabhouh was staying.

Al-Mabhouh was born in the Gaza Strip, but had been living in Syria since 1989.

He is said to have engineered the capture of two Israeli soldiers during a Palestinian uprising in the 1980s and was imprisoned several times by Israeli forces.

Hamas has said he was an "important" member of Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades, Hamas's military wing named after a Syrian religious leader who fought British colonial forces in Palestine in the 1930s.