Security News > 2011 > January > Dubai Assassination Followed Failed Attempt by Same Team

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/dubai-assassination/ By Kim Zetter Threat Level Wired.com January 4, 2011 The successful assassination of a high-ranking member of Hamas early last year in Dubai followed an unsuccessful attempt by the same hit team two months earlier, according to a magazine story out this month. The elite team suspected of orchestrating the kill tried to poison Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in November 2009 in Dubai, according to GQ magazine. The unknown toxin, possibly slipped into a drink or placed on fixtures in a hotel room, left al-Mabhouh mysteriously ill but not fatally so. Al-Mabhouh recovered from the illness without knowing he’d been poisoned, only to be killed by the same team about two months later on Jan. 19, 2010. The article, written by Ronen Bergman, an Israeli investigative journalist and author, leaves no question that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency was behind the attack. The agency’s code name for al-Mabhouh was Plasma Screen. Most of the details in the article have been previously reported, but the piece does add some new information. Israeli spies, for example, had been monitoring al-Mabhouh’s e-mail and online activities via a Trojan horse planted on his computer, and therefore knew when he’d be arriving in Dubai, according Bergman. They did not, however, know which hotel he’d be staying at, which forced the well-prepared hit squad to improvise a bit. [...]

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