Were Irish Passports Used By Israelis Fake or Real? Are "concerns" by government "more smoke than fire"?
Will someone - anyone - ask the Irish government to get it's story straight on the Passports used by Mossad to kill a Hamas leader in Dubai? And how much did they know, and when, and are they just "going through the motions" with reactions "more smoke than fire" with the Israeli Ambassador? On Wed. February 17 the Irish government says they were fakes, and there were no record of such passports. Then the next day, they said they were fakes - but because the passports were in the hands of Irish citizens. Bear in mind: it is possible to secure a genuine passport through nefarious means - so were they genuine, or actual forgeries? The Dubai police and international experts say they are real - the only thing the Irish side has been consistent on is saying "fake".
At least three of the 11 suspects are already known to have been using fake passports - Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said it could not identify the three said to have been using Irish documents. "Ireland has issued no passports in those names," it said, adding that the documents released by Dubai authorities had the wrong number of digits on.
The European passports used by the killers of a Hamas chief were not fake, the Dubai police chief has insisted.
"The European passports used by the team which allegedly killed Mahmud al-Mabhuh last month were not fakes and that Dubai immigration officers were "trained" by European security experts to spot such documents," he said.
"No forgery was found in those passports."
Irish government sources told this website that the numbered passports are "here in Ireland in the hands of the Irish citizens, so if the Dubai passports are using the same numbers, they have to be fake."
"It's likely that just trying to deflect criticism of their officials and passport control. The passports are fake."
Q. Were those passports real, or not? If not, who are the people in the photos? The eleven known members of the hit squad utilized British, Irish, German, and one French (the squad leader) passports. These passports are real, and so are the photographs in them, which are those of the actual members of the Kidon (the Mossad’s assassination unit) who used the passports to enter and exit the United Arab Emirates. The agency behind the assassination operation used stolen identities of real people, in order to apply for real passports issued under the names of these real people, but with photographs that match the members of the Kidon assassination squad.[intelNews.org - Wed. February 17, 2010]