Passports of Dubai suspects ‘do not exist’

NO records exist of the three alleged Irish nationals Dubai police have claimed were members of a group that assassinated a senior Hamas official last month.

The Department of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that the trio of alleged Irish passport holders identified yesterday in Dubai as Gail Folliard, Evan Dennings and Kevin Daveron do not appear in passport records.

The passport numbers issued by Dubai authorities also are believed to be counterfeits, as they have the wrong number of digits and contain no letters. Several newspapers in the region published the trio’s passport numbers yesterday.

“No records exist of any Irish passports issued with details corresponding to those that have appeared in media reports. To date there is no evidence that any Irish nationals are involved in this incident,” said a foreign affairs spokesperson.

The department is in contact with the United Arab Emirates in an effort to ascertain the exact facts of the case. Labour spokesperson on foreign affairs Michael D Higgins said the use of fake Irish passports by those involved in the killing was “of grave concern”.

The assassination gang that killed Mahmud al-Mabhouh was comprised of six British passport holders, three Irish and the holders of a German and a French passport, Dubai police said yesterday.

Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room last month. The killing occurred about five hours after Mabhouh arrived in a Dubai hotel. According to authorities, all 11 suspects were out of the United Arab Emirates within 19 hours of their arrival.

Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, blamed Israel’s Mossad intelligence service for the killing.

The assassination incident is not the first time Irish passports have turned up in the murky world of international espionage. During the cold war Irish passports were believed to be regularly used by CIA and British intelligence operatives. During the infamous Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s, where the government of Ronald Reagan was implicated in the sale of weapons by the CIA to a moderate faction in Iran with the proceeds used to secretly fund right-wing forces battling the Nicaraguan government, US agents are believed to have travelled on Irish passports.

In 2007, former CIA agent Bob Baer, whose life inspired the spy movie Syriana starring George Clooney, said in an interview: “Ireland was never a strategic target for the United States. Instead the Irish looked the other way. Even on Iran contra [affair] they looked the other way. I think our chief of station in Iran had an Irish passport.”