British Authorities Summon Israeli Ambassador to Talk About Dubai Hit-Team Probe

Britain’s Foreign Office announced that it has asked for a meeting tomorrow with Israel’s ambassador to the U.K. to discuss a delicate subject: the growing international uproar over the mysterious team of assassins that used fraudulent British passports last month in a plot to murder a senior Hamas official.

Dubai officials have released pictures, names, and passport numbers of 11 foreigners they say were members of a hit squad that killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his Dubai hotel room on Jan. 19. Six of the passports are British, three are Irish, and one each are German and French.

As we reported yesterday, both the British and Irish governments say the passports that the alleged hit-team members used were either fraudulently obtained or outright fakes. Since the story broke, several British nationals with the same names as those on the passports cited by Dubai investigators have come forward to say they had no involvement in any spy plot and don’t know how or why their identities had been stolen.

So why the rush meeting with the Israeli ambassador? The British media have traced some of the people whose identities were stolen to Israel, intensifying speculation that the plot may have been the work of the country’s intelligence agency Mossad.

British media, with American media following at a careful distance, are portraying the case as a spy drama.

Michael Barney, a former Londoner who moved to Israel more than 30 years ago, told the Daily Mail newspaper that when he learned his passport had been cited by Dubai investigators, “I checked to see where my passport was straight away, but it was still there. I can only think that someone has effectively stolen my identity and used it to carry out this attack.” He told the newspaper that he had undergone a quadruple heart bypass surgery and insisted, “I'm not exactly spy material!”

In an official statement, the Foreign Office said that “given the links to Israel of a number of the British Nationals affected, there will be a meeting between the FCO Permanent Under Secretary and the Israeli Ambassador” on Thursday. Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency would lead the U.K.’s inquiry into the affair, in cooperation with authorities in the United Arab Emirates.

Obama administration officials and U.S. intelligence sources have declined to comment on the case. A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington told Declassified: “We do not comment on these issues.”

One European official said the way the British worded the announcement about tomorrow’s meeting with Israel’s envoy suggests that the event will be more than an informal chat but less than a full diplomatic dressing-down. Usually when the U.K. wants to signal its anger at a foreign government, it will publicly declare that their ambassador to London is being “summoned” to meet U.K. brass—a word that was not used in this case.