New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH and ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: January 29, 2010
SANA, Yemen — A senior Hamas official was murdered in a Dubai hotel room last week, the Palestinian militant group said on Friday. Hamas accused Israel of the killing and vowed to retaliate.
The official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 50, lived in Syria and was a founder of Hamas’s military wing, which has carried out hundreds of deadly attacks against Israel since the 1980s, Hamas officials said. He had survived several previous assassination attempts, relatives said, including one three months ago that left him in a coma for 24 hours.
The Dubai police issued a statement saying that Mr. Mabhouh was killed hours after arriving in the city on Jan. 19 by a “professional criminal gang” that left Dubai before the body was discovered. The killers had been tracking him since before his arrival in Dubai, and most of them traveled on European passports, the statement said.
There were conflicting reports about how Mr. Mabhouh was killed, with some relatives saying Hamas officials told them he was electrocuted and others saying he was poisoned or suffocated. Osama Hamdan, a Hamas spokesman in Lebanon, said “we will not talk about the details until we have put all the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Israeli officials declined to comment.
Assassinations are rare in Dubai, a polyglot business hub on the Persian Gulf where deposed foreign leaders sometimes sought shelter among the city’s skyscrapers and luxury hotels. But that began to change last year after a former Chechen rebel was shot dead in an underground Dubai parking lot.
“The myth that Dubai is the eye of the storm, and no one will touch it because everyone has an interest, is being blown apart,” said Christopher Davidson, the author of two books on the United Arab Emirates, to which Dubai belongs.
Mr. Mabhouh is said to have organized the capture of two Israeli soldiers during a Palestinian uprising in the 1980s. He was imprisoned several times by Israel.
Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2006, but its political leaders are also based in Damascus, Syria. There have been a number of attempts on the lives of Hamas members. Last month two Hamas officials were killed in a mysterious explosion in southern Beirut, near the headquarters of Hezbollah. In 1997, Khaled Meshaal, the leader of the group’s Damascus politburo, survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Amman, Jordan.
Mr. Mabhouh was buried on Friday in the Al Yarmouk Palestinian camp, near the Syrian capital, on Friday afternoon. Television images showed large crowds of Palestinians in attendance, as pallbearers carried his coffin, draped in a green Hamas flag.
Hamas officials visited the Mabhouh family home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza and vowed to avenge his death.
Ismail Haniya, the leader of the Hamas government in Gaza, kissed Mr. Mabhouh’s father on the forehead and described his son as a hero. Another senior Hamas leader in Gaza, Khalil al-Hayya, told reporters at the Jabaliya home that Mr. Mabhouh was “not the first one the Mossad’s hand has reached.”
“We reserve our right to respond to this crime in a suitable time and place,” Mr. Hayya said. But, he added, “We in Hamas emphasize that our battlefield is the land of Palestine and our battle with the enemy is in Palestine,” and not on foreign soil.
Mohammed Abdel Raouf al-Mabhouh, the brother of Mahmoud, said in an interview that he had last seen his brother in May 1989. Mahmoud felt that he was in danger, according to his brother, because of his involvement in the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers in separate incidents that year.
Mahmoud escaped Gaza without telling his family where he was going. Mohammed said he had not been back in Gaza since, but that his wife and children had visited there in 2007.
On Jan. 20, according to Mohammed, Mahmoud’s wife called from Syria to say that Mahmoud had been found dead in his hotel room in Dubai, hours after his arrival there.
“We were sure there was something mysterious about his death,” Mohammed said, adding that his brother had been the target of several assassination attempts before.
