Assassination suspects ‘hiding out in Israel’

DUBAI’S police chief said yesterday the suspects in a Hamas chief’s assassination in the Emirate are now hiding out in Israel to avoid arrest and urged the Jewish state to wage its wars at home.

Mahmud al-Mabhuh, a founder of the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20. Police on Sunday said he had been drugged, then suffocated.

“I say [the suspects] are in Israel. Israel says they are in Israel,” police chief Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan said. “If they stay in Israel, they won’t be arrested.”

But “eventually they will leave” and can then be detained, he added, referring to a list of suspects passed on to Interpol.

Twelve British, six Irish, four French, three Australian and one German passports were used by 26 named suspects, according to Dubai police, who say they had fled the southern Gulf emirate on flights to Europe and Asia.

Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said yesterday that the five Western nations whose passports were used “should answer to the world” over the murder.

Speaking in Geneva, Mottaki wondered whether their “security services, intelligence people or a part of their government have been involved,” and possibly co-ordinated the assassination.