UK denies advance knowledge of murder in Dubai

British government sources dismiss as “nonsense” any advance foreknowledge about a Mossad plan to assassinate a top official of Hamas in Dubai last month.

A member of the Israeli intelligence service claimed earlier that MI6 and the British Foreign Office were tipped off that Mossad agents were going to carry out an ‘overseas operation’ using fake British passports.

“Any suggestion that the government knew anything about the murder before it happened is completely untrue, including the use of UK passports,” a Foreign Office spokesman said Friday.

‘We received the details of the British passports a few hours before the press conference [by police in Dubai],” The Daily Mail quoted the official as saying.

“We were able to respond to the Dubai authorities on the authenticity of the passports the next day,” he added.

Dubai police have released the identities of 11 people carrying European passports, including those of the six Britons, which they said were used in the killing of senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a hotel last month.

“The head of the Dubai police has also made clear that embassies were not contacted until shortly before the identity of the suspects was revealed,” said the spokesman.

Britain had earlier ruled out the involvement of any British nationals in the assassination plot, saying the murderers were mostly Mossad agents using forged documents.

British embassy staff in Tel Aviv said they had tracked down five of the six and offered them new passports. He said consular staff had not yet to manage to contact one of the British nationals in Israel whose identity was used in the cloned passports.

“This step will reduce the risk that these people might be inadvertently detained,” embassy spokesman Raffi Shamir said Friday.

Interpol has issued “red notices” for the 11 suspects to help find and arrest them anywhere in its 188 member countries.