Suspects Mount in Dubai Murder

The January 19 killing of a military commander for the Palestinian Hamas group in a hotel room in Dubai has been front-page news for weeks here. The Dubai police originally identified 11 suspects carrying forged European passports, and recently added 15 more, to bring the total to 26, showing their photos (often smiling), names and passports on a full page spread looking like a school yearbook page. They used passports from the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, and Australia, with European-sounding names that could not be mistaken for Israeli.

The Dubai police have put together the logistics of the plot using surveillance video, credit card payments and phone records. Both men and women, some traveling as couples, are shown in surveillance videos from the airport and hotels using various disguises (such as wigs, hats and sunglasses and a tennis outfit) and are thought to have played various different roles in the plot. For example, the "tennis player's" job was to discover the victim's hotel room. The Dubai police have stated that they are virtually certain that Israel's secret service Mossad was behind the assassination with the logistical support of the suspects.

I hear more suspects may be named soon, which raises obvious questions. Why were so many operatives needed? Where did they come from? How is the Dubai police getting such detailed information about the suspects and their roles? What could the Dubai police put together about my comings and goings here in the last month? It raises concerns that Dubai's relatively open border for most tourists, like me, who get a 30-day tourist stamp visa upon entry, may not stay that way. (I have yet to get my residency visa due to the need to obtain official certification of my marriage license in the USA.)

The commentators here have been strangely silent. The news broke while the Israeli woman tennis player Shahar Peer was in town (she was denied a visa to come to Dubai last year) making her unlikely run to the semifinals against Venus Williams. The only sign of concern was that she played all her matches, even the semifinal, on a more confined side court with entry through a metal detector, the only court so protected.