Who can imagine the appalling strangeness of being ‘linked’ to the assassination of a man whom you have not heard of, in a country you have never visited, for reasons you do not understand? Perhaps Kafka.
Who can imagine the appalling strangeness of being ‘linked’ to the assassination of a man whom you have not heard of, in a country you have never visited, for reasons you do not understand? Perhaps Kafka. Certainly Michael Lawrence Barney, a recovering quadruple-bypass patient who returned from work to find his children staring at the newspaper, wondering if their father was a terrorist. Melvyn Adam Mildiner must know the feeling, too. He was suffering from pneumonia when he discovered that Interpol had issued a warrant for his arrest. Nine others, six British passport-holders in total, were implicated in the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas military chief executed in a Dubai hotel room last month. Not one of them was involved.
In fact, their genuine passports were duplicated and doctored — a form of identity fraud favoured by Mossad, the Israeli security service, to provide their agents with aliases. Most of the Brits had reportedly at some stage handed their passports to Israel for visa purposes. Its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, assures us that there is ‘no reason’ to think that Mossad were involved. But, at the time of writing, he hasn’t denied it either.
The British-Israeli accord has been strained before. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher repeatedly warned the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, that his agents were endangering the relationship of our two nations. Eventually, she shut down Israel’s intelligence station in Kensington, expelling its operatives.
Relations could be strained again. Certainly, if the controllers of last month’s ‘kill squad’ felt entitled to give their agents British passports, they were wrong. They showed contempt for their relationship with our country.
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