Britain will expel an Israeli diplomat over the use of forged British passports in the assassination of Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, a British Foreign Office official said on Tuesday.
Mabhouh was killed in January in what Dubai police have said they are near certain was a hit by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Dubai authorities have named 27 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian, and said they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and depart from Dubai.
The British Foreign Office said Foreign Secretary David Miliband would make a statement on the matter at 5:30 P.M. (1530 GMT).
British media reports said the seniority level of the diplomat who faced expulsion was unknown.
The Foreign Ministry said it had no immediate comment on the report. Spokesman Yigal Palmor said he was checking the details of the report.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a role in the killing of Mahmoud Mabhouh, a Hamas military commander, in a Dubai hotel room in January.
Israeli Ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, was summoned to the Foreign Office in London on Monday to be told that results of an inquiry into the murder of Mabhouh have determined for certain that British passports were forged as part of the operation.
According to media reports, there was growing speculation that a diplomat would be expelled as "a mark of the ‘anger’ within the government that British passport holders had been put at risk as a result of the operation."
Prosor was also reportedly told that a ministerial statement will be made to Parliament in the coming days formally naming the Israeli security services as responsible for the cloning of up to 15 British passports as part of the Dubai operation.
The statement will not state definitively whether the Mossad was involved and will instead mention both them and the Military Intelligence Directorate.
But the Foreign Office made it clear to Prosor that the probe had determined for certain that the passports were forged when British citizens passed through airports on their way into Israel, with officials taking them away for ‘checks’ which lasted around 20 minutes.