Israel Matzav

Inspector Tamim's man is ice cold

Remember Inspector Tamim, the Dubai police chief whose fifteen minutes of fame rivaled Baghdad Bob's back in January? Well, Inspector Tamim got his man. There's only one problem: His man has been dead for nearly forty years.

Soon after the January assassination of a top Palestinian official here, Dubai police stumbled onto what looked like a big break in the case.

They linked a white-haired man with glasses to several suspects caught on security cameras preparing for the murder. Most of the suspects in the case had carried forged passports, but this man had a real British one. It identified him as 62-year-old Christopher Lockwood.

A cellphone linked to him had recently been switched on in France. U.K. authorities found his London address. They also discovered that in 1994, he had changed his name from Yehuda Lustig. Mr. Lustig, they determined, was born in Scotland to a Jewish couple from what was then British-controlled Palestine.

The findings raised hopes of nabbing one of the orchestrators of the hit, possibly providing proof for accusations by Dubai police that Israel's intelligence agency Mossad was behind it.

But just as quickly, the trail went cold, a Wall Street Journal examination of the case shows.

British police staked out the London residence, but Mr. Lockwood never showed up, according to investigators. They didn't find him in France, either. More troubling still, Mr. Lockwood's prior identity looked to be a ruse: Mr. Lustig was reported killed in 1973 as a young Israeli soldier during the Yom Kippur War, according to official Israeli obituaries. That left investigators no closer to finding out who Mr. Lockwood really is.

Read the whole thing. Maybe the Mossad didn't bungle the job so badly after all.
Heh.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:37 AM