Irish passport holders lose their charm in Dubai hit

  This video report from Al Jazeera includes key portions of the footage and shows some of the news conference at which it was presented. Britain's  ITN News reportedthat the victim's brother blamed  Mossad for the assassination.

 In pictures: Details of prime suspects

Two Palestinians have already been arrested and are being investigated on suspicions that they provided logistical support to the killers, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Chief of Dubai Police, said at a press conference held at the Media Office of the Dubai Government.

Some of the 11 suspects including a woman fled the country around the time of the crime on January 19. The Palestinians, however, are UAE residents, the police chief said.

Rather Oddly the Dubai Police claims it managed to crack the case in less than 24 hours, Dahi said. "This is another achievement for Dubai Police."

Ireland's Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that three of the suspects said to have used Irish passports do not exist, The Irish Times reported. The ministry added that the passport numbers were obviously fake, since they had the wrong number of digits and contained no letters, as genuine Irish documents do.

 Julian Borger and Adam Gabbatt in  The Guardian reported that "British officials said today that the British passports used by six suspects in the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai were forgeries, and that the suspected assassins are not British nationals."

German officials told The Associated Press that the number on a passport used by a suspect named Michael Bodenheimer, who traveled to Dubai from Frankfurt and left for Hong Kong three hours after the killing, was too short.

The French foreign ministry told AFP on Tuesday that it was "not able to confirm the nationality" of the one suspect said to have used a French passport.

AFP also reports that Dubai police said they are questioning two Palestinians in connection with their investigation. Dubai's police chief said that both men are residents of the United Arab Emirates who "fled to Jordan" after the killing and were extradited three days ago.

In Israel, a man with the same name as one of the suspects identified by the Dubai police as a British national who was a member of the team told Reutersthat his identity must have been stolen.

Speaking in British-accented English, Melvyn Adam Mildiner, resident of a town near Jerusalem, told Reuters he had nothing to do with the assassination and had never been to Dubai. "I woke up this morning to a world of fun," he said in a sarcastic tone, after Israeli newspapers splashed names and photos of the suspects distributed by Dubai.

"I am obviously angry, upset and scared -- any number of things. And I'm looking into what I can do to try to sort things out and clear my name," he said in a telephone interview.

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman observed that the actions of the 11 suspects shown on the security camera footage were similar to methods apparently used by Israeli intelligence agents. Mr. Melman wrote:

The Dubai police chief says it is not unlikely that the assassination teams were made up of Mossad agents.

The bits of information and the camera images suggest methods used by the Mossad that Mishka Ben-David wrote about in detail in his novel "Duet in Beirut." Ben-David, who served as the intelligence officer for the Caesarea operations branch of the Mossad, insists that his novel is a work of fiction. However, it is obvious to all that the experience he accumulated in the Mossad over the years appears in his book.

"Duet in Beirut" is very similar to the failed attempt in 1997 to assassinate Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal in Jordan. Ben-David describes the Mossad agents changing hotels, changing vehicles, arriving from different destinations, and changing clothes and appearances in order to make identification difficult.

Parts of the above report were complied from the New York Times Lede blog