Slain Hamas leader rose from mechanic and bodybuilder to ‘resistance fighter’

Slain Hamas leader was mechanic, bodybuilder

DAMASCUS, Syria — After years spent looking over his shoulder for potential assassins, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was finally taken down by a hit squad in a luxury hotel room in Dubai.

The senior Hamas commander, a shadowy figure who lived much of his life abroad, had survived attempts on his life before — including an ambush by Israeli soldiers disguised as farm workers.

Hamas is blaming Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, which never openly discusses its operations, while Israel says there was no reason to assume the Mossad is responsible.

The circumstances surrounding al-Mabhouh’s death remain sketchy, although Dubai authorities describe how an 11-member team carrying European passports swooped into the Gulf city-state last month, suffocated the 49-year-old militant in his hotel room, then fanned out with clockwork precision to Europe, Asia and South Africa in less than 24 hours.

Details were also scarce about what led al-Mabhouh to become one of the founders of the military wing of Hamas, which has carried out hundreds of attacks and suicide bombings targeting Israelis and rules the Gaza Strip.

He was not one of the towering figures of the movement and was little known to the people of Gaza, having left the territory in 1989 to work abroad.

Israel considered him to be the point man in smuggling Iranian rockets into Gaza that would be capable of striking the Jewish state’s Tel Aviv heartland. He also was involved in the 1989 capturing and killing of two Israeli soldiers.

Born on Feb. 14, 1960 in the Jebaliya refugee camp in Gaza, al-Mabhouh was the fifth of 14 children. He dropped out of elementary school, began an apprenticeship as a car mechanic and eventually opened a garage, according to his younger brother, Fayek, who still lives in the camp.

“We were a large family, but we were not poor,” said Fayek, speaking after a memorial rally for his brother attended by about 3,000 Hamas supporters Wednesday evening.

He also was a keen sportsman who once won a bodybuilding tournament in Gaza, Hamas said.

Fayek said his father frowned on the hobby because he felt sports clubs were a bad influence, and that his brother often had to sneak out of the house to attend practice.

By his mid-20s, al-Mabhouh had grown increasingly interested in jihad, or holy war, and joined the Gaza branch the Muslim Brotherhood, the pan-Arab movement of which Hamas is an offshoot.

After going to prison for a year in 1986 for weapons possession, he got to know the Hamas movement’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. A year later, with the outbreak of the first Palestinian uprising, he joined its military wing.

His first child, Mona, now 24, was born around this time, followed by Abdel-Raouf, 21; Majd, 11 and Ranim, 7.

In 1989, al-Mabhouh was involved in killing two Israeli soldiers on leave.

Sgt. Avi Sasportas was abducted outside the coastal city of Ashkelon, near the Gaza Strip, and shot to death. Cpl. Ilan Saadon was abducted the same year while hitchhiking just north of Gaza. His body was found in 1996 buried under a coastal road south of Tel Aviv.

The deaths prompted a raid on al-Mabhouh’s home in the Gaza Strip in which Israeli forces dropped onto the balcony and roof and stormed through the front door, said Hamas. Israeli soldiers disguised as farm workers staged a simultaneous raid on his garage.

But al-Mabhouh escaped and went into hiding for two months before crossing the border into Egypt, Hamas said. Then he moved to Libya and finally Syria.

Despite disappearing entirely from the public scene, Hamas says al-Mabhouh was still playing a “continuous role in supporting his brothers in the resistance inside the occupied homeland” at the time of his death.

The group did not, however, give clear reasons for his presence in Dubai, and he was not traveling with a bodyguard, despite having survived three previous assassination attempts, including the 1989 raids, a poisoning attempt in Beirut two years ago and a bomb planted in his car in Syria.

Another brother, Hussein, said al-Mabhouh did not like drawing attention to himself.

Dubai police chief Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, however, said there was “serious penetration into al-Mabhouh’s security prior to his arrival” in Dubai.

“Hamas did not tell us who he was,” Tamim said. “He was walking around alone.”

More than 2,000 Palestinians attended al-Mabhouh’s funeral on Jan. 29 at the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, near Damascus.

Additional reporting by Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah