They – whoever they were – managed very efficiently to kill a Hamas leader in his hotel room in Dubai.

Here is a video put together from surveillance cameras. It silently shows calm, cheerful men and one woman (or two?) casually moving about, smoothly carrying out their mission.

From the report accompanying the video:

[Mahmoud] al-Mabhouh, 48, was a founder of Hamas’s military wing. He was believed to be behind the abduction of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 and said to be a liaison for smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza. He had survived several assassination attempts.

He was found dead in room 230 at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel on January 20. The door on al-Mabhouh’s room was latched and chained [?] from the inside, and there was no blood evidence. An initial report indicated that he died from sudden high blood pressure in the brain. Subsequent reports have suggested he was electrocuted or strangled.

They – or perhaps it was only one of them – having done the deed, came out of the room and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside door handle. (A nice James Bond touch, that.)

Then they left Dubai on flights to various destinations including Hong Kong and South Africa.

Their – allegedly fake –  passports were British, Irish, French and German.

Whoever could the mysterious assassins really have been?

(Update and question:  The latest update on [the Dubai Police Force’s] website reports that the “passports of the mercenaries” who killed Mabhouh were not fake. “Dubai immigration officers were trained by European security experts to spot such documents. This training qualifies immigration officers to spot fake passports. They applied these procedures at Dubai airport when the alleged [killers] entered the country,” he said. “No forgery was found in those passports.” If so, the documents were issued by the British, Irish, German and French passport authorities; so did Britain, Ireland, France and Germany despatch the assassins?)