Dubai Hamas killing movie set for 2013 release

A movie based on the 2010 assassination of a senior Hamas operative in Dubai is expected to hit cinemas next year. The killing in a luxury Dubai hotel, in which Israel's spy agency was accused, has been turned into a movie called Kidon, or Spear, starring an Israeli supermodel. The $5.2m film, named after supposed name of the Mossad's assassination unit, is expected to hit theatres in France and Israel next year, Associated Press reported. The movie gives the plot a twist by having a small-time gang of criminals murder Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in an attempt to frame Israel's Mossad spy agency and stars Bar Refaeli, a former girlfriend of Hollywood superstar Leonardo Di Caprio. At the time of the real-life killing, Dubai police accused Mossad of carrying out the hit in a five-star hotel, and released surveillance camera footage of the assassination team tracking al-Mabhouh. At the time, Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim said he was "almost certain" that Israeli agents were behind the slaying. Israel and Mossad, as is their policy, never confirmed or denied involvement. "The movie is not a documentary and it's not a history movie. It's my take on the al-Mabhouh story," Emmanuel Nakash, the movie's director told AP. Refaeli plays Einav Schwartz, an Israeli temptress whose role is to lure al-Mabhouh into the assassins' trap. For the film, a luxury hotel in the Israeli resort city of Eilat served as the Dubai hotel. The characters are all fictional, except for al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader in exile who helped smuggle weapons to militants in the Gaza Strip, AP said. In the Dubai killing, the hit team — including two women — entered the Gulf city undetected on foreign passports, pulled off the highly complex operation, then escaped the country. The photos on the assassins' doctored passports were released by Dubai police and published worldwide, as were their 26 aliases. More than half of the names turned out to belong to real-life dual nationals living in Israel, some of whom claimed their identities had been stolen, AP added.