The foreign minister Stephen Smith has revealed a fourth Australian passport-holder had been drawn into the murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai, after Interpol issued an alert for a suspect using the man's name. A team of Australian Federal Police and Australian Passport Office officials are already in Israel to investigate the use of three fake Australian passports in the January death of Mahmud al Mabhouh.
Mr Smith said that a fourth Australian passport, in the name of Joshua Krycer, had also been linked to the alleged assassination. "Inquiries by the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Passport Office indicate the further passport presented in Dubai was fraudulently duplicated, as was the case with the initial three passports," Mr Smith said. "There is no information to suggest that Mr Krycer, as with any of the other three Australian passport holders, was involved in any way, other than as victims of identity fraud," he said in a statement.
Mr Mabhouh, a founder of the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20. Police say he had been drugged then suffocated. Australian reports said Mr Krycer is a speech pathologist who works at a hospital in Jerusalem. *AFP
