You remember, perhaps, the case of the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mahboub in a Dubai hotel last January. The Israeli Mossad was believed to be responsible, but their connivance could never be proven. Now U.S. intelligence sources are reportedly suggesting that the caper was not actually supposed to be an assassination but rather part of a series of abductions designed to gain the freedom of an Israeli soldier named Gilead Shalit who had been kidnapped by Hamas gunmen four years ago:
Debkafile cites US intelligence sources as speculating that Mahboub was to have been one of half a dozen high-value Hamas operatives Israel planned to grab in January in different parts of the Middle East as bargaining chips for the Israeli soldier.
As the man in charge of Iran's weapons supplies to Hamas, Mahboub was judged a key lever for obtaining the Israeli soldier's freedom.
Those US sources believe the plan to snatch him from a Dubai hotel went smoothly enough up until the last step. But then, the drugs administered to knock him out appeared to have killed him on the spot. He was meant to be doped enough to let himself be bundled out of the hotel on his two feet in the middle of the team of abductors without drawing attention. According to this theory, the team was to have driven him to Dubai port and put him aboard a waiting yacht, which was to sail off and rendezvous with an Israeli naval missile boat in the Red Sea.
After delivering him, the same team was to have proceeded to its next target.
But whether they gave Mahboub an overdose or whether his health was frailer than believed, he did not survive. The abduction team leader, lacking instructions for this exigency, decided to abort the mission and leave the dead man in place. He told the would-be abductors to get out of Dubai fast and scatter. The rest of the high-risk, ambitious plan was scrapped.
Interesting theory.
RLC
