Alleged Assassins Caught on Dubai Surveillance Tape | Hacker News Reader

Alleged Assassins Caught on Dubai Surveillance Tape

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82 pointsphsr44 comments

The amount of effort that would need to go into creating that video and the facts that the article asserts is just impressive:

-figuring out the group of people

-how everyone entered the country

-all of their phone communication while they were in the country, including finding out their numbers

-how they spent money inside the country

-their motions inside the country

-where they went after they left the country

Why do you find it impressive? I have a distinct feeling they know much more then this... I'd be surprised if they didn't have by now a file of at least half of them. What we've seen is simply competent police work, nothing more. The police are trained, paid and well funded to do exactly this kind of thing... I'm really not surprised to find it worked for once.

I am surprised though to see it public. In the good ol' days this would have been handled much more discreetly.

The first lead probably came from the hotel cams.

  When al-Mabhouh arrives at his hotel around 3 p.m. on the 
  19th, the footage captures two of the suspects, dressed in 
  tennis gear, getting into the same elevator with him to 
  follow him to his hotel room. The two suspects later 
  checked into the room across the hall from him

It's not that impressive if the tapers knew where the suspects were going before hand.

They probably got it from the secret service? Those likely have most of this information in a database and can get it with the the press of a button.

That would be a pretty impressive database.

Of the two methods currently being used to deal with the militant Islamic fanatics, the 'War On Terror' has only really achieved in causing mass terror amongst our own people and imprison hundreds of innocent people because our government's criteria for 'wrong place and wrong time' were basically Afghanistan and post-invasion.

However the allegedly Israeli approach causes virtually no terror to our own people (in fact it appears to instill the exact opposite of terror), it has no collateral damage and only a minor amount of innocents get caught in the cross hairs.

What I'm wondering is if the 'Israeli' approach to militant Islamiscs the better approach? IE is it getting the job done at a better tax-payer cost and a better ethical cost (less young soldiers dead, less innocents wrongly imprisoned and less collateral damage vs. a wrong target).

A fair number of innocents get caught in the crosshairs of the Israel. A targeted assassination by Mossad killed the wrong man [1], Palestinian civilians have been used as human shields [2], Amnesty International found that Israeli military checkpoints are a "key cause of high rates of unemployment and poverty" among the Palestinians [3], and a UN report concluded that "there was strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law, both humanitarian law and human rights law, were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza" [4].

To be clear, I'm not taking a side on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Crimes are being committed on both sides daily. The above evidence is presented only to debunk your claim that the Israeli approach "has no collateral damage and only a minor amount of innocents get caught in the cross hairs". That's a rather audacious claim given how messy Israel's struggle with Islamic militants is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/02/israel1

[3] http://www.amnesty.no/Web.nsf/e94cc2698ef66716c1256a03006a4d...

[4] http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32057&Cr=pa...

Not to justify either method, but that's a few orders of magnitude away from the "war on terror" casualties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

True, but the scale of the war on terror (based on populations of the countries involved) is a few orders of magnitude larger than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. If you adjust the number of casualties for population, the two numbers become similar.

Of course, this comparison is still a naive one, but it's a lot closer to reality than comparing the two conflicts by the raw number of casualties only.

The thing is who decides who gets killed and who not. You could argue that Bush caused the massacre of thousands of Iraqis, or something similar for past Israeli leaders. Does that mean that we can assassinate them? W/out even a fair trial? Once you go through that path, things get scaringly fuzzy.

It reminds me of the idea -popular in Latin America- that there are bad dictators and good dictators (pro markets, etc.). I've seen people that supposedly like freedom and democracy take a very pragmatic approach, being happy under the rule of Pinochet/Fujimori/etc.

The US has in the past effected regime change through assassination, for instance against Fidel Castro.

Good/bad dictators is a well known debate. "King" is an old term for "[military] dictator".

One bad problem is that most every king/dictator made certain to put his own relatives in positions of power. That means that the leadership competence in future generations will be very varied.

From history studies, somewhere between 25%-75% of my country's royalty were total asshats. When you have a fixed incompetent leadership that is very hard to change, then employees/citizens/etc will suffer.

There are more problems, like that you just can't tell an absolute ruler, which has been brought up for the job, all the things he needs to hear. [Edit: A dictator can be said to have an alternative version of "Kill your darlings", when someone complains about his worst ideas...]

Edit: To sum, I'm with Churchill on this: "... democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Edit: Some points of grammar.

Interesting HN comment about that Churchill quote:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571797

I've read about that discussion but lacked the energy. :-)

(Anyway, your link might have a point in that the inherited dictators might on average be less actively evil than those that crawl to the top of the heap. That seems like arguing that some cancer form has a little bit less mortality than lung cancer. It might be true, but the practical/emotional impact is low.)

Targeted assassinations remove problems in organizations, but don't necessary secure territory. Aside from securing territory other upsides of the War on Terror approach are getting to consolidate security at home and using war abroad to funnel money to friendly contractors and black ops front companies. The fate of Al-Quaeda doesn't really matter at they're not a significant threat to the state.

The problem with that, from the perspective of the instigators of the "War on Terror," is that you don't get to show off what a big dick you are when you pull off an effective intelligence operation. Suskind's book The One-Percent Doctrine is very revealing in this regard. There were effective intelligence operations against Al Qaeda, but the fruits of them were repeatedly squandered for egotistical reasons. In one case, the CIA decapitated the main financial institution used by Al Qaeda and put their own guy in charge of it. This really shone a light on Al Qaeda endeavors for a time, but the US government kept giving the insights they gleaned from it to the Israelis (with no obvious quid pro quo) and the Israelis kept using those insights to solve their own internal problems until people twigged and started finding more secure ways to move their money around.

This should be the long term goal of US security policy. Israel has been dealing with terrorism long enough to have developed an optimal strategy. I think the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan reflect that US intelligence and covert operations just weren't ready to deal with Islamic terrorism so we had to fall back to conventional warfare to prove a point. If there's anything good to come out of this at least we have even more proof that fighting conventional wars even on a relatively small scale is just too costly, destructive and ineffective even for a super power. Hopefully it gives the whole world less incentive to escalate into war. It seems as though over the generations we're heading in that direction. Wars are generally getting smaller and less deadly as technology actually allows them to become bigger and more deadly. That's some reason for optimism.

The collateral damage includes political fallout, damage to bilateral relations with friendly countries, and an increase in the risk of being treated as a pariah.

Are you talking about the collateral damage of (e.g.) invading Iraq or Afghanistan? Or are you talking about the collateral damage of using hit squads to take out terrorist leaders?

GP seemed to be trying to say that targeted assassinations didn't have collateral damage. I was trying to say that it did.

The collateral damage of sanctioned assassinations.

exactly. Is it worse in the eyes of the world to say that you're 'fighting a war on terror' and invade a country or secretly kill high-ranking enemy officials for years before finally getting caught?

The second is more expedient, but if you kill the wrong person at the wrong time, you can probably cause yourself a lot more harm than good. Imagine if the US killed Saddam Hussein by poisoning his breakfast!

Israel is interested in self-preservation, the United States is interested in imperialism. This is the root difference in the strategies; we stay in Iraq or Afghanistan because our leaders want to establish friendly governments there. If we left, the people would reject the sham governments we've installed and resort back to something that provides their needs, fundamentally, stability and security.

It's a privilege and a responsibility to live under what's considered a "free" government, and not everyone can handle that. You can't just waltz in and apply it universally across the globe and expect it to work, especially if the people of these other countries feel it was forced upon them. In these cases, there is too much contention and tribalism among the groups in the constituted nations to allow for a peaceful, useful democratic co-existence, which is one of the main reasons these governments do not form spontaneously in the area. The people there just can't handle that kind of system as it is, whatever your opinion on that system is, either for unwillingness, resentment, or inability, and forcing it only makes the problem worse.

You can't take a newborn and try to force it to walk. All that will do is harm the baby physically and harm your relationship psychologically. The capacity just isn't there. Even if you spend lots of money on harnesses and things that keep the baby in a bipedal stance, and cuffs and strings to lift his legs, it's not the same thing, and doing this only stands to worsen the situation overall. If you allow the child to develop these capacities naturally in his own time, everything is good and happy.

We have to allow the natural growth of these things. Our puppet governments don't work because the people don't accept them, and they especially will resent anyone who invades their territory to impose a "better way" on them. How would the US feel if China invaded and said, "This is for your own good, so that you can learn the glories of Communism, so that you are free from your oppressive corporatist leaders."?

Do you think, even if China is right there, any American will accept that? We would vow ourselves to destroy the invaders. Those in the Middle East do likewise.

The only alternative to 'sham' governments imposed from outside are 'strong men', Saddam, for all his shortcomings functioned remarkably well in that role as did for instance Tito in former Yugoslavia.

Tribal friction needs an equally strong force to overcome it if a country is not to explode into its constituent parts.

So if you remove the strong man once he's established terrible stuff can happen, sometimes worse than what the strong man himself did. (Again, for instance Yugoslavia was definitely not the best country in the world to live in under Tito, but it was a lot better than living in a civil war).

> The only alternative to 'sham' governments imposed from outside are 'strong men'

Please be careful with that. In my country (brazil) we had a US-sponsored military dictatorship in the sixties-eighties that was both "strong men" and a "sham government", and it crushed a lot of the intellectual and cultural development happening in brazil at the time, all the while only preventing a very small risk that the country would turn communist. And today one of our most US-friendly presidents (Lula) is an ex revolutionary (and many people in his government were politically persecuted, exiled and tortured during the dictatorship).

It's really awful to think that this is still happening in other places around the world, and that fundamentally the american people do not see any major problem with the idea of interfering militarly in a government across the globe.

Alex, I'm sorry if I came across as a supporter of such trickery, rather the opposite.

Apologies, that was definitely not my intention.

But just like Castro was propped up by the former USSR at the time of his ascendency, so was Tito, and Saddam was actually a puppet of the US.

> The only alternative to 'sham' governments imposed from outside are 'strong men'

Maliki seems to be on course for fulfilling that role in Iraq.

I agree with you, he definitely is. And that basically makes him the next Saddam.

The Mossad Kidon (it's assassination branch) is rumoured to only have about 50 or so operatives. Which means they potentially compromised almost 20% of their resources to take out this one target.

This was almost certainly not Mossad, for precisely that reason. Mossad is not known for sloppy work, and this was nothing if not sloppy. The passports were bad fakes; several of them were duplicates of real innocent Israeli lookalikes; 11 people to kill one guy with no security detail, all of them with their faces on camera? Yeah, pretty sure this wasn't Mossad.

They went to a lot of trouble to make the death look like a heart attack, even somehow having the door locked from the inside as they left.

But it seems like it was immediately obvious to the police that this was a murder, so what was the point of going to all that trouble?

I'd say just to save time and face. If he was found with a bullet through his head or something like that it is not unreasonable that all airports and roads would be closed for a while, but if it looked just like a heart attack the murderers have a bit of extra time to leave the country.

I love that there was a guy whose whole job was to show up at the hotel, pay for the room across the hall from the target, hand off the key, and then immediately leave the country.

Flagged. What's this Mossad PR stunt doing on HN?

I'm hoping for someone to discuss the implications as they relate to technology, PR, security, and privacy.

What technology is necessary to gather that much video so quickly? Is that video feeding into a central hub? This is Dubai, a relatively tiny country. Did they build this technology themselves or did they license it.

PR. What's to gain from releasing this? It's fascinating but long. It's definitely not put together as a soundbite, in fact it has no sound.

What are the security implications of releasing this information? Will it make future assassins think twice?

What about the privacy implications? If you were incorrectly identified as a lookout what would you do to clear your name? The story includes some Israelis who share names with the assassination team who are freaked out right now.

The technology is CCTV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television. It is imported from all over the place and is probably not feeding into a central hub. In most countries UAE included it is found in all hotels, airports and Shopping Centers. The assassins for sure knew about it but because of their modus operandi did not worry about it. If you notice the end of the video says the hotel staff opened the room 17 hours later and that the latch was locked from the inside. They made the murder appear as a heart attack (other reports at the time) reported it as electrocution - probably killed him by inducing a heart attack via electrocution.

The team scattered to different places and all the names and nationalities mentioned are probably false. They also probably had multiple passports and on leaving Dubai appeared in another country with a different name.

Accounts from previous Mossad agents have explained one technique they have employed for this kind of murder: They give the victim hardly traceable anesthetic and fever inducing drugs, then, when his body temperature is exceedingly high, he is submerged in icey water (f.ex. in a bathtub). Apparently this causes heart attack in the victim and is very difficult to distinguish from a natural cardiac arrest.

Deleted comment

I cannot make myself believe world's and especially mid-east's most feared inteligence service making mistakes in this level (Security cams ha? Who knew!). This case is more like a message telling "we come, we find, we kill your leader wherever he is and btw don't forget to comment us on Youtube". That's why I called it a stunt.

Hotels are full of security cameras these days. That's perhaps why the assassination victim thought he could travel to a hotel safely even though he surely had deadly enemies. The story, which is worth discussing among hackers, is how the assassins circumvented the security cameras to operate in what was, as it appears, a foreign country for them.

After edit: this quotation from the submitted article, "The door on al-Mabhouh’s room was latched and chained from the inside, and there was no blood evidence," shows more tradecraft than I have for leaving a modern, secure hotel room and ensuring that the assassination scene will yield little evidence and not be discovered at first.

Did it not enter your mind that this video comes from Dubai security services and not Israel?

The real question is the motivation of Dubai in making and releasing this video. I highly doubt that it's as an advertisement for the mossad (even if it may end up coming off as such).

Somehow "Dubai security services" sounds like a joke instead of a beacon of Arabic intelligence to this mid-eastern ears of mine. Thus I think this whole thing ended up as a Best of Mossad episode.

This reminds me about the movie "Munich".

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