At least two of new Dubai suspects have namesakes in Israel

Feb 24, 2010, 20:20 GMT

Tel Aviv - At least two of the 15 new suspects named by Dubai police as part of their investigation into the January murder of a Palestinian militant commander have namesakes in Israel, Israeli television reported Wednesday.

A father of five from the town of Ben Shemesh, near Jerusalem, with the name of Philip Carr said he was 'in shock' on hearing the news that one of the suspects had allegedly used his identity.

Carr confirmed he had a British passport, which he said he had only used once to travel abroad, because he also had Israeli and South African passports. He said he was born in Britain, but grew up in South Africa, before immigrating to Israel.

'I'm still a little in shock that I heard such a thing today. I'm simply a little in shock,' he told Israel's Channel 10 news.

'It surprises me.'

Mark Daniel Sklar, whose name was also on a British passport used, according to Dubai police, by one of the suspects, too said he had nothing to do with the Dubai operation.

'Of course I don't. No! No! No!,' he told the channel.

'In a while it'll be 7 million, all of Israel's inhabitants,' he quipped.

An Israeli man named Stephen Kayat, meanwhile, said he only had one passport, an Israeli one, with that name and that he was not the Stephen Keith Drake whose name was used in one of the allegedly fake British passports.

Some seven of the 11 suspects earlier named by Dubai police are also said to have namesakes in Israel.

Dubai authorities have said they are '99 per cent' certain the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, was behind the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas commander from Gaza allegedly suffocated to death in his Dubai hotel room, most likely with a pillow.

Hamas and Israel said al-Mabhouh was charged with smuggling rockets from Iran to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

The 15 new names brought to 26 the number of suspects in the case after police had identified 11 suspects earlier this month.

Twelve held British passports, six had Irish ones, four French, three Australian and one suspect carried German documents.

Channel 10's military affairs correspondent, Alon Ben-David, said it seemed unlikely to him that 26 people would have participated in the assassination of one man.

'Even if you combine together, according to the theory of espionage, according to espionage books, the team which followed him, the assassination team, those in charge of the escape and logistics, 26 sounds like a lot,' he said.

He suggested some of the assassins could have used more than one identity, or some of those exposed by Dubai police as having used forged passports, following the investigation of the al-Mabhouh murder, could have been involved in an entirely unrelated mission.

'I remind you that Dubai is a centre for a lot of Iranian and of terrorist activity, a place which Israel - and also the rest of the world - is very much interested in,' he said.

Dubai police said 14 of the new suspects used credit cards issued by the same US bank.