'I'm an IT worker not an assassin' An Israel-resident British IT worker has reacted with horror to news that a suspected member of an alleged hit squad used a passport with his details to enter Dubai, before allegedly participating in the assassination of a prominent Hamas official. UAE authorities reckon 11 "agents with European passports" participated in the …
Now if only those expat Brits in Israel had had the ID card, none of this would have happened...
I do wonder, however, over the 'assassination by suffocation'. Suffocation? As in, with a pillow? As in strangling? Are we sure this gentleman was assassinated, and not, say, accidently killed in some kinky sex games? I don't want to cast aspersions on the dear departed,but a male dead in a hotel room tends to be a corpse from a lot more likely causes than assassination.
So people travelling to, or emigrating in Israel had their IDs stolen and fake passports made. It follows that you cannot trust the IDs of passengers who originate or travel via Israel, and their IDs need to be determined independantly. The Israeli issued passport can no longer be trusted as the true identity of the person.
Likewise we need to ensure that Shengen information System and other databases *shared* with third countries cannot be used by Israel against us. The car registration data shared across Europe for example.
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2009/12/14/dvla_prum/#c_648005
It should be a crime for a politician to accept money from the lobby groups of rogue states like this.
See dispatches for discussion of front groups used by Israel, including turfing companies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTC4jbZ7hTY
And the attempts to attack the BBC trust is appalling, see 2:30 of this one onwards which reveals the 'British' protest group is run by the Israel Army propaganda unit from Israel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDzQJdQa0wY
Please return to your usual habitat of the Daily Mail/News of the World online forums and leave the real discussion to the adults...
Everyone just assumes this is Israel without a shred of evidence. Personally, i doubt Mossad are this inept (e.g. being easily identified on camera, the obviously fake passports, the use of half-israeli citizens names (great way to draw suspicion back on yourself that, huh?), etc.). It looks to me like an excellent attempt to place blame on Israel and generate anger and suspicion against their people. Quite obviously based on your reaction and those of the daily mail readers like you - its succeeded.
But please, if you can tell me another story showing Mossad to be this seriously inept then i'd love to hear about it... I might then go and subscribe to the daily mail! *rolleyes*
And in response to your actual points -
a) Yes lets share Schengen information with countries outside of the EU because all of them have such great data protection laws, human rights record and would never do anything with our data that we didnt want them too...
b) Your quite right, no politician should accept money or gifts from ANY lobby group. Indeed in my opinion professional lobby groups should be outlawed, but unfortunately thats the way the current system is. If you dont like it vote with your feet at the next election or make an official complaint to the relevant political oversight committee.
c) If you honestly believe that Israel is the only group that do this then you are being seriously naive. Every major nation (e.g. China, Iran, Russia) have similar groups working for them, as do the oil companies, tobacco companies, various greens parties, etc. This is why the BBC has special units that look into complaints. Because if they actually paid attention to every complaint, then you would have no television because every show offends someone.
Seriously grow up...
"But please, if you can tell me another story showing Mossad to be this seriously inept then i'd love to hear about it..."
On behalf of the family left behind by Ahmed Bouchiki, allow me to suggest that you give this a gander:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Ok based on the same amount of evidence that you are using to draw your conclusions, let me propose an alternative sceanrio which meets all of the "facts" at our disposal.
Lets start with the fact that our Hamas "Hero" survived 3 assassinations. Now in the Vietnam war, the US Military Intelligence unit had a saying "Once is an accident, Twice is happenstance, Three times is Enemy Action".
So perhaps our Hamas hero wasnt so much of a "resistance" hero as an israeli/CIA/etc double agent, a very highly ranked double agent. Perhaps someone within the heirarchy of Hamas discovered this. What to do? If you expose him and kill him that will look terrible, one of your most highly ranked generals turning out to be a spy. Thats a great way to forement distrust and is a great way to see your terrorist organisation self implode. (Or perhaps he just ended up on the wrong end of a "cabinet reshuffling" within Hamas...)
So how to turn this to your advantage - hmmm we know he's survived 3 previous "assassination attempts". Well why not let number 4 do the job. So you hire a team of Europeans (Ex-KGB, serb-bosnia, etc. there's bound to be a team or two running around on the Hamas books), make sure they organise to be very obvious (obviously fake passports, passports from dual-Israeli citizens, be caught on CCTV, etc), and have them assassinate your man.
Hamas screams Israel did it, the world media looks at the 3 previous attempts and condemns Mossad without any evidence (why let evidence get in the way of a good conspiracy?), and Israels long standing policy of not commenting either way on assassinations makes it look even guiltier. Job done - a traitor killed, your enemy loses face (and potential friends), and all is happy in terrorist land.
Fits all of the available evidence and explains the obviousness of the hit. But a very different outcome to the knee jerk anti-israeli responses most of you lot are spouting.
Personally, i'll hold of making a decision about who did it until a little thing called "Evidence" comes to light. I know its an outmoded concept in this day and age but you know some of us still believe in Innocent until proven Guilty.
On a side note - I have been mystified by the almost complete disregard that the media has portrayed in following up Hamas's comment that this guy was in Dubai attempting to buy weapons. Considering that there is an almost global ban on selling weapons to Hamas, it would be VERY interesting to know who was looking to do the selling and what weapons they were trying to obtain. I wonder if the Dubai police are spending anytime following this angle, seeing as its their soil being used to conduct illegal weapons sales... Yeah your right im not holding my breath...
So you don't deny Israel did it? Just like the spokesman, you're doing the "you have no proof we did it" claim? Only with a more fanciful alternate claim?
"some of us still believe in Innocent until proven Guilty"
The courts will decide guilt. We don't have death squads in Europe, they will be arrested, put on trial and they can state their fanciful theories to a jury in their defence.
It's not like we kill someone then pronounce them guilty in the EU.
"Fits all of the available evidence and explains the obviousness of the hit. But a very different outcome to the knee jerk anti-israeli responses most of you lot are spouting."
Gone through your whole life without hearing about Occam's Razor, I see.
Israel have form as long and miserable as your propaganda, and statistically speaking the murder of ANY Palestinian, militant or not has a very good chance indeed of being at the hand of Israel. So like it or not, until further notice they are in the frame
You can tell the loons are out in force when all the "anti-this, anti-that" meaningless bullshit starts surfacing - it's not a fucking football match.
Grenade, there's no cluster bomb.
I'm not drawing any conclusions here, but it seems to me that if a bunch of people living in Israel have had their passports reproduced with varying levels of accuracy, there are some reasonable lines of inquiry to be pursued with regard to how their details were obtained. The obvious starting point for this is - surprise! - Israel.
And although it's too early to point the finger, when you're looking at how information that is typically shared only with government agencies - especially if the people featured in the article are to be believed - ends up being used by criminals, it isn't illogical to consider which government agencies could be obtaining or repurposing such information.
Really, when someone gets assassinated, it's fair game to suspect the intelligence services of various nations - there's a whole genre of American television based on this - so cries of such speculation being "anti-Israel" are just puerile: I imagine that the overwhelming majority of Israelis are just as offended by the idea of extra-judicial killings being perpetrated in their name as the overwhelming majority of clear-thinking British or American citizens would be, had MI6 or the CIA been fingered for this particular incident, and I'm sure they'd want to know that it is occurring and be able to respond.
I reckon the (late) BOFH would disagree. "BZZZZTTT" springs to mind.
Oh, now I get it. His 'death' was faked so he could pop over to Dubai with the other cattleprod (he sold me the first, which after repeated and effective testing, I was absolutely and utterly compelled to buy).
"Electronic Device" to open the door? That'll be the PFY, an old calculator and a bit of Veroboard. Banged to rights!
Interpol - go no further than Vulture Central's tape safe.
Care to bet whether biometrics and more ID regulations restricting ordinary people will be touted as the ultimate fix for what from afar looks like forgeries? And bad forgeries at that. If border guards aren't even going to look at passports the normal way, how will RFID help, where the readers cannot distinguish cloned chips from the real thing?
It'll give politicians a warm fuzzy feeling of "unforgeability", is what it'll do. Which means that when (not if) someone figures out how to break the electronics and forge a passport, the impersonated persons will simply not be believed. And with biometrics they'll be even further up shit creek, for they are much more easily forged than replaced. That is a fundamental built-in weakness of biometrics, which is just one reason why using them to glue people to bits of plastic, or database records, is a fundamentally flawed idea. Yet, it happens.
The industry has a word for that. "Snake oil". But until politicians understand that a false sense of security is worse than no security at all, nothing will improve. Sadly, the general public will likely have to catch on first. So spread the word.
"British authorities received an assurance from Israel it would not use forged British travel documents following a diplomatic protest in 1987..."
Well, then it obviously didn't. After all, people who would commit a cold, calculated professional murder would certainly never dream of stealing someone's passport details... er...
And anyway, we know that governments never lie.
but its clearly obvious from the British and German passport photos that the passports are fake - you are not allowed to be smiling or pulling stupid faces like the people in most of the pics, and you have to be facing perfectly towards the camera. Those should have been dead giveaways! (Poor form from the Dubai border police - but then again they were probably busy arresting someone for exasperating "You've got to be fucking kidding!")
I can hardly believe the fact that someone could have made these sorts of utterly obvious slip-ups on a mission like this, and still suceed in that mission...
I'm more then a little suprised that no-one slipped on a banana peel and ended up electrocuting themselves ala Pink Panther...
This has Mossad written all over it but all this media interest is doing is turning this gun running, murderous douchebag who probably got a much nicer ending than he deserved into a Martyr..
I wish our SIS' had the balls to do stuff like this more often. Then perhaps nobody would be f**king with us over oil in the Atlantic and our FCO would be feared, when it speaks, instead of ignored..
What about the innocent Moroccan waiter, assassinated in Norway by Mossad because they mistook him for a Palestinian hijacker? Why couldn't they have tried to extradite him instead, whereupon his innocence would have been established?
This kind of extra-judicial killing is reprehensible no matter the country it originates from. The fact that it's Israel doesn't surprise me though - this is a country that was established by the ethnic/religious cleansing of the Palestinians, and has ignored UN resolutions ever since.
Israel was established by the British government after a vote in the UN (that's one UN resolution that wasn't ignored)
Also, I wonder if you know the definition of the phrase ethnic cleansing... Because you might have it mixed with "border dispute", or even "occupation", both of which might apply to the political state of affairs in Israel over the past 60 years , but neither of which implies genocide.
You might recognize the word "occupation" as the very same that is oft used to describe British presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even the Falkland islands. I hope your replies to stories about the British government are equally vile.
You also should read a bit about Israel's history, particularly about the 1948 war. It may shock you to discover that many Arabs fled Israel willingly (not all though.... ) hoping to return once the invading Arab armies crush the Jewish state. These people are still waiting by the way.
Those who opted to stay, are called Israeli Arabs, they are Israeli citizens and they even get to go to the same schools as Israeli children, and vote for their own Arab parties in the Israeli parliament. There are over a million Israeli-Arab citizens in Israel, about a fifth of the population of Israel. Palestinians don't count as Israeli citizens, nor do they want to be, they have their own bodies of governance, that's where they vote for terrorist organizations to represent them at the peace negotiations.
Of course, I don't believe that the Mossad is behind this operation, despite the fact I'm not morally opposed to it. Simply because the Mossad would never use Israeli identities in such an obvious way.
You know that fairly tales end in 'and everyone lived happily ever after'.
The only way forward for Israel is to become a peaceful nation, not with turf and killings and secret agents on fake passports and money thrown at foreign politicians.
Do you think calling an invasion a 'border dispute' really fools anyone?
Mate,
You are out of your mind... the country was established far before the departure of the British occupation forces.
The independence of Israel was at the time of the UN vote, a matter of time. Countries are not established by foreign nations but by themselves. Look at Kosovo's history and you see that long before UN forces landed in the region, Kosovars had expressed their will to self ruling.
In fact, it is a violation of international law the proclamation of independence by foreign intervention....
I bet Mossad can't be too happy about the backlash against this.
I noticed they disciplined 2 generals over the white phosophorous bombing of civilians in Gaza. That is clearly a war crime, and they seem to have chosen 2 generals and singled them out as fall guys for any future war crimes trials.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8490646.stm
So when a prosecution happens, they want those 2 generals to take the wrap for the war crimes, not the politicians, at least thats what the politicians hope.
Likewise so they'll find someone in Mossad to discipline and pretend it was a rogue operation, just so that that person can take the fall and the politicians pretend to be all innocent.
If this was mossad (who are usually pretty meticulous about covering such tracks) why would they steal the identity of foreign nationals living in israel? It would just immediately leave the finger of blame pointing back to israel, which makes absolutely no sense in the 'wet work' game.
All of them couldn't have been directly involved in the murder, they should offer the peripheral ones immunity and safe haven in Europe if they squeal on the rest.
Then we should find out how many of these murder cells there are operating in Europe and prosecute the leadership of the country involved rather than settle for the small fry.
I bet they never expected to see themselves on CCTV, or that Dubai would scan all the passports of people entering and leaving the country. But these are the best leads we have now, and if we don't catch this murder squad, then the next murder squad could be used against OUR leaders, if it could be so easily used against Palestinian leaders.
So we'll know for sure soon enough.
And the Mossad agents concerned (and I think it is Mossad) should realize that the best way for Israel to cover it's tracks would be to kill them and incinerate the evidence. So they should accept the immunity and save themselves.
As should the families of their agents, if they recognise their daughter or son, they should realize how damaging this is to Israel and therefore how much their children are at risk from a Mossad style cover up. Better to squeal and save them as quickly as possible.
assuming that countries share the means to verify them at each border. It would be ironic if we had to surrender our privacy in that respect merely to stop government officials (of whatever nation) placing us at risk by posing as us whilst they carry out crimes they would imprison us for if they caught us committing them.
Alternatively as every border post will scan our passports on entry, does that mean every country we visit could have enough material to make fake documents with our IDs and correct reference numbers? I've been to some dodgy places in the past. That could be one disincentive to further travel.
Brilliant!!!
That's how we will all make our carbon limits; no more need to burn petrol, or jet fuel, and we will all be glued to our ever-present telly for the CCTV footage across the country - Big Brother: Your Next Door Neighbor!*
*Self-inflicted injury to escape this hell not allowed, citizen.
a lot in IT would probably consider becoming an assassin. So, it is like a double insult.
Pick on another profession for your patys. If you think about it most IT don't need to move from their basement HQ do they, we have this thing called the Internet and Mobile communications which generally allows access to all from anywhere, so why would IT people be travelling on business it is not for the personal touch now is it. So IT people are a bad cover. Doctors, and Lawyers and Business Executives, make for good cover though.
"...British authorities received an assurance from Israel it would not use forged British travel documents following a diplomatic protest in 1987, the news agency adds..."
Yeah! Assurance doesn't necessary mean that was/still is true :-)
I guess, some not wanted puzzle work MI5 to do... unless they were blind by trust.
Given Israel is an international state issuing it's own biometric passports, and is clearly not averse to forging passports from other nations, it doesn't take much effort for them to be able to forge biometric ID from other countries.
In simple terms, *ALL* ID can be forged, it simply depends on the cost. And nations such as Israel would have no problem spending the type of money involved in creating forged documents for Mossad.
AC for obvious reasons (although I bet someone in MI5/CIA/KGB/Mossad has hacked the El Reg database)
The Home Office added a visa requirement to visitors from South Africa to "counter passport and identity fraud". Here we have identity fraud by Israel, and so there needs to be an identity check on visitors coming from Israel to Europe urgently.
They should introduce a VISA requirement on visitors from Israel and double check their identity.
http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/newsarticles/2009/july/visa-requirement-for-sa-enforced
We also need to search them for false documents on arrival. It seems that they were able to enter Europe with concealed fake identity documents and able to then travel to Dubai pretending to be Europeans.
Today they're killing Palestinians in Dubai, but tomorrow it might be a critic of Israel in the UK, or European politicians critical of Israel in France. I don't believe people are free to be critical of Israel if Israel is able to send hit squads to kill them.
"Israel says no proof it carried out Hamas Dubai killing"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8520247.stm
And if the agents should 'disappear' off the face of the earth then there never will be proof and Israel will never have to face the damage this caused to them.
If I was one of the agents, I would be worried that my boss wants me to disappear very very badly and those bosses order killings at the drop of a hat.
yes, i find it is getting harder to survive these darned ASSIGNATION attempts by these temporary Brits and Oirlanders. perhaps that ID card scheme is not such a bad thing after all because then at least these ID fraud victims will have the satisfaction of knowing their birthdates are correct.
Is it me or doesn't anything think that the British passport photos have not been scanned at all well due to the overlay of special security plastic. How does this work with systems that scan the photos and compare them to a photo of the actual person. The Irish ones seemed the clearest.
Mossad's had some less than successful operations in recent years, like its stuffed-up assassination of Khalid Meschal; and even smaller stuff-ups like getting its spies arrested in New Zealand (of all places???). Its operations in the 60s and 70s gained Mossad a reputation for total efficiency, but it hasn't been able to maintain that peak- at a guess, it's got a bit middle aged and complacent, and the rest of the world has caught up with it a bit.
The operation looks too complex and well-organised to have been put together by anyone other than a state-based intelligence agency. As for the CCTV coverage, perhaps it's the price you have to pay these days- agents may have to resigned to having shorter field-lives than before.
I doubt that the agents look to much like those pictures.
I somehow suspect that 80% of a team of Mossad assassins (assuming that IS who they are) probably don't have eyesight bad enough to need glasses, and the dodgy hairstyles on some suggest wigs while the others look like they've shaved their heads and every single man sports a beard or excessive facial hair.
If those people had different hair styles & colours, no glasses and a shave £5 says that you could walk past the lot without recognising them. Not that your likely to, unless you happen to be a known terrorist buying weapons of course.
On the beebs website now,........ "Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said there is no proof the Mossad spy agency carried out the killing"......
Oh wow, the Bart Simpson defence, and a new low for diplomacy.... "You never saw me do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything"..... Awesome.
It seems our trusted allies are not so allied with us as we thought.
They are prepared to abuse our sovereignty and trust, reducing trust in our country and documents for their own convenience.
Some of our trusted allies are as bad as our enemies.
Anyone who doubts Israel is currently engaged in ethnic cleansing need only read Robert Fisk's articles in timeonline.co.uk or any other independent accounts of life in Israel's occupied territories.
As for people evacuating Palestine after Zionist terrorists bombed the King David Hotel, and using that to claim they'd permanently given up all rights to citizenship in the country in whose territory they were born, using that logic many Frenchmen and Poles would have given up their land to the Germans in 1939.
It would have been bad logic then. It remains bad logic.
As for Britain setting up Israel, British law dating back to the British Raj in India, and still in effect today, prevents our country taking land from natives without adequate compensation. (This is partly why the US War of Independence was fought, so they Americans could just take indian territory.) So Britain broke its own laws taking land from Palestinians and giving it to Jews.
you obviously have no clue when it comes to histroy. If you bothered to check your facts instead of reading the timesonline.co.uk you would know there has never been a Palestinian state. Gaza was part of egypt, and the west bank was part of Jordan. I am not sure which UK law you are refering to, but the british empire has commited more human rights violations against the native populations of many countries with no compensation. British palistine was partitioned not by British government but the UN. shortly after israels formation, Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and they are the ones that lost the land everyone now calls Occupied territories. The jews have been on that land for thousands of years, and have as much right to the land as any arab.
Just goes to show how one article from a tabloid newspaper can make people think every word written is truth...
Must be a bit of a pain having to walk around without an identity.
Is it me or does "Identity Theft" sound more like something made up by government and business to shift the blame and responsibility onto Joe Public?
I'm sure all of this someone-pretending-to-be-someone-else was just called "fraud" a few years ago.
Hey there, lots of Israel bashing here.. but all fail on 2 point
1) innocent till proven guilty is still the motto of the "western" justice system (assuming most el reg readers hail from this side????)
2) Lets be honest here the guy was a self confessed terrorist, and proud of it, nevermind who rubbed him, it can only be good for the world
Just my 2 cents of perspective....
<duck and roll> to get out of the line of fire
@Keith T
Native "Palestinians" don't exist. The Romans called the Jews "Palestinians" to insult them as the real "Palestinians" were a bunch of unruly pirates from somewhere near Greece who frequently raided Judea.
If you really want to talk about natives of that little strip of land then it should be native Judeans...or Jews as we say in English.
Forging of passports continues to be an easy task even after the introduction of biometric passports.
People have yet to realise that the use by foreign immigration authorities of the biometric information contained in the passport is optional and restricted to certain points of control.
Haven`t been to Dubai but I doubt their hotels conduct any biometric matching of guests during check-in, as such, changing identities while "in-transit" would be an easy task...
Moreover, if the Dubai immigration controls also refrain from performing the biometric matching, the novelties introduced in the last few years have almost no impact on forging.
This is clearly an operation set to harm Israeli x British relations.
BTW, have you people realised that all evidence come from the same country whose police and judiciary cleared a certain royal from accusations of torture despite the existence of a certain video tape???
Dear Mossad,
You've been knocking people off for decades, surely you could have done a better job. You should have knocked him off in an area without CCTV and covered your tracks better. And what made you choose British passports, in future choose passports from some insignificant country like Albania or Molodova, better still just use fake Blockbuster cards as id. And using 11 agents is overkill particularly in this economic climate, James Bond is a lone wolf, use him in future or the team from Spooks, If they're busy try the Hustle team!
@ Aron- Ethnically speaking, Jews came from Judea- the 20km or so around Jerusalem. They may or may not have practised Judiasm. People practising Judaism from further north came from Samaria (part of the old northern Kingdom of Israel), and were called Samarians, or Samaritans. Even in Jesus' time, there was little love lost between these groups- the parable of the 'good' Samaritan was meant to show to the Judeans Jesus was preaching to that good existed in all people, even those as beastly as their northern neighbours. Yes, there have been Jews living in the region for a couple of thousand years, but there have been numerous other ethnic groups living there as well, at the same time, before and after. A Jewish state, justified by such historical oversimplifications, is based on a dodgy premise, particularly when it has to go to the extent of pinching British IT workers' identities to hide its extra-curricular activities.
You also seem to be confusing your Seleucids with your Sea Peoples- but don't worry, they're only a millennium apart.
>> The Mail adds that Mildiner used Twitter to pose queries about iPhone application related queries on the day of Al-Mabhouh's murder.
Thank goodness we have The Mail to backup his alibi. All they need to do is for tweets relating to killing (suspected) terrorists and they will have caught the real killers.
Does The Mail, and the media in general, get paid every time the twitter is mentioned? Or perhaps it's like fairy wings and bell ringing - every time a "journalist" finds a twitter angle he creams himself? Any chance we can get a "web too point oh angle" icon? Maybe I could suggest this http://www.gifanatics.com/files/aaappp.gif (NSFW)
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