Mossad forged my passport to carry out 1979 killing, says Briton

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Mossad forged my passport to carry out 1979 killing, says Briton

Man tells how he was questioned by special branch after Israeli revenge assassination for 1972 Olympic attack

    Paul Lewis
    guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 February 2010 16.06 GMT
    Article history

Peter Derbyshire

The infamous 1979 assassination of the Palestinian who masterminded the Munich massacre was carried out using a forged British passport belonging to a 27-year-old council worker living in a small flat in south London, the Guardian can reveal.

Peter Derbyshire, who at the time was running leisure centres for Lambeth council, found himself being questioned by special branch over the assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of operations for Black September, the terrorist organisation behind the hostage attack at the 1972 Olympics that resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes.

Derbyshire, who now runs a travel company in the French Pyrenees, told the Guardian: "I received a call at work from someone who said: 'I'm from ­special branch. I'm inside your apartment. Can you come home?'"

He returned to find his flat in Balham, south London, had been turned upside down by two special branch officers. He was interrogated for hours by the police, who asked detailed questions about his history and political affiliations.

Eventually they told him his passport number had been used by a man named Peter Scriver in the murder of Salameh in Beirut.

"I could prove black and white, with a hundred witnesses, where I was when the assassination took place," he said. "They took my passport away. They said it was far too dangerous to be in possession of such a passport. Then they came back with a handwritten cheque from the Bank of England to buy a new one."

Now 58, Derbyshire said he hoped his story would encourage the British government to do more to end the use of its citizens' identities in Israeli covert operations.

"We now know that for at least 31 years Israeli agents have been cloning British passports to carry out their dirty work," Derbyshire said. "Something should be done."

Salameh, a notorious figure in the Middle East known as the "Red Prince", was perhaps the Mossad's number one target. For years he lived with his wife, a former Miss Universe, under the partial protection of the CIA and was often tipped as a successor to the Fatah leader, Yasser Arafat.

His eventual murder in Beirut was the result of a seven-year hunt by the Mossad in its operation, codenamed Wrath of God, to avenge the Munich attacks.

Salameh, who also used the alias Abu Hassan, was killed along with four bodyguards and two bystanders by a massive car bomb, planted by three Mossad agents using foreign identities. They were a female agent using the cover of a British charity worker named Erika Chambers; an agent posing as a Canadian, Roland Kolberg; and the technician in the group, pretending to be Scriver, a Briton just in from Geneva.

It was Scriver, thought to have planted the 100kg of explosives in a rented Volkswagen, who was using a forged version of Derbyshire's passport. Although the surname was changed, the other details in the passport, including the ID number were the same as those contained in Derbyshire's travel document.

Scriver's passport is thought to have been listed to an address in Herne Hill, a south London residence where Derbyshire had lived some years previously.

Derbyshire said he had never travelled to the Middle East, and believed his passport details must have been stolen by the Mossad during summer holidays in southern Europe in the 1970s.

After asking police if his life was in danger, Derbyshire recalls they replied: "If we can find you, they can." He said they also told him he should not be surprised if he received a "visit" or "something comes through your front window".
Bad reputation: Dubai and assassination
There is compelling evidence that Dubai has become the venue of choice for state-sponsored death squads seeking to rub out their enemies. Last year Dubai police issued an arrest warrant for seven Russians said to be involved in the assassination of Sulim Yamadayev, below, a Chechen military commander.

Yamadayev was gunned down in the car park of the Jumeirah Beach Residence on 29 March 2009. He died instantly after his assassin shot him from behind in the head. Investigators discovered a pair of black gloves at the scene, a vest, and the murder weapon ‑ a gold-plated pistol abandoned in a grass verge. Dubai police established a link with Chechnya and with the republic's pro-Moscow president, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is allegedly implicated in a series of murders including that of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in Moscow in 2006. Kadyrov was also embroiled in a blood feud with Yamadayev. Yamadayev's brother Ruslan, a former state duma deputy, was killed in 2008 outside the British embassy in Moscow after an assassin opened fire on his car. Sulim Yamadayev fled to Dubai, thinking he would be safe there.

In fact, the murder team was able to operate in Dubai with ease and apparently had little difficulty in tracking him down; sketches of his Dubai home were later found in his killers' apartment. The Dubai authorities accuse Kadyrov's cousin and right-hand enforcer Adam Delimkhanov of masterminding the operation. This month a court in Dubai heard how Delimkhanov smuggled the gold-plated murder weapon into Dubai via a diplomatic bag, while on a visit with Kadyrov as part of an official delegation. Delimkhanov, the court heard, handed it to the killers and also provided them with photos of the target. Delimkhanov denies the accusation. An Iranian and a Tajik suspect are currently on trial in Dubai accused of collaborating in the premeditated murder of Yamadayev.

Luke Harding, Moscow
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/fe ... l-olympics