DUBAI Sophisticated surveillance systems installed by Dubai in a bid to protect its status as a Gulf business and leisure hub have enabled it to piece together an apparent hit by one of the world's most fabled spy outfits.

Less than a month after top Hamas commander Mahmud al-Mabhuh was found dead in a hotel room in the emirate, police have issued photographs of 11 suspects, causing Interpol to circulate arrest notices for the suspects.

Dubai police chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan has said he is 99 per cent sure Israel's Mossad intelligence agency was behind the killing and has said that, if so, its chief Meir Dagan should face prosecution.

In a humiliation for the storied spy agency, he described the killers as “stupid” because their moves were “traced second by second” by security cameras.

Analysts said the investigation was a major coup for the security-obsessed emirate.

“The attention given to the maintenance of law and order in Dubai can border on paranoia but it's a positive paranoia,” said the director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, Riad Kahwaji.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere and the emirate's security services also employ a huge number of informants.

“With 203 nationalities represented, just imagine the number of interpreters” they have to use, said Kahwaji.

Security analyst Ibrahim Khayat said the pace of the investigation had shown that the Dubai police were “one of the best forces in the world.”

Better, the surveillance capabilities of the emirate were used as an “instrument of protection not as a means of intruding on personal freedoms,” he said.

“The Mossad failed to take account of the capabilities and technical expertise of the Dubai police,” he said, adding that the agency had “blundered by using fake passports, triggering a crisis with European governments.”

“The Mossad probably won't be able to use most of the commandos ever again because their photographs and fingerprints were on the passports.”

The Dubai police have recorded a number of high-profile successes in the past.

In 2008, after Lebanese starlet Suzanne Tamim was found stabbed in her flat, they secured the conviction of Egyptian businessman Talaat Mustapha and an accomplice by following a credit card trail. Both are now on death row.

And surveillance cameras led to the arrest of two suspects — an Iranian and a Tajik — who are currently in custody awaiting trial for the March 2009 murder of former Chechen rebel leader Sulim Yamadayev.—AFP