What’s YOUR point?

What’s your point?

Er, sayan is the singular and sayanim is the plural.

This report is not factually correct. Some of the errors are self evident (the Diplomat Hotel does not overlook Valletta Grand Harbour). There is no evidence that the agents that were charged with the assassination resided in the same hotel as their intended victim.

Significantely, the term kidon, is misused here as Kidon is a department and does not refer to individuals.

Similarly, sayan has no significance unless you’re a mountaineer intending to go and climb the mountain of the same namesake in Asia or are an intrepid traveller and interested visitor of the remote village in Bali. The correct term is sayanim.

The necessity of a radio link with a boat that had dropped anchor off Malta is obscure, and frankly quite unnecessary, so in all probability is factually untrue.

And finally, the report that Shqaqi was shot six times in the head is untrue. This means, to me at aleast, that this report was drawn from interviewswith persons in possession of scant information in turn largely derived from nth source.

Incorrect….the information was provided directly to the Maltese authorities by another nation.

The same tactics had been placed on stand-by on October 24, 1995, for the assassination of Fathi Shkaki who, like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, had reached the top of Mossad’s target list as a result of his terrorist attacks.

Two kidon – code-named Gil and Ran – had left Tel Aviv on separate flights. Ran flew to Athens, Gil to Rome. At each airport they collected new British passports from a local sayan. The two men arrived in Malta on a late-afternoon flight and checked into the Diplomat Hotel overlooking Valetta harbour.

That evening, a sayan delivered a motorcycle to Ran. He told hotel staff that he planned to use it to tour the island. At the same time, a freighter that had sailed the previous day from Haifa bound for Italy radioed to the Maltese harbour authorities that it had developed engine trouble. While it was fixed, it would drop anchor off the island. On board the boat was a small team of Mossad communications technicians. They established a link with a radio in Gil’s suitcase.

Shkaki had arrived by ferry from Tripoli, Libya, where he had been discussing with Colonel Gadaffi what Mossad was convinced was a terrorist attack. The two kidon waited for him to stroll along the waterfront. Ran and Gil drove up on the motorcycle and Gil shot Fathi Shkaki six times in the head. It had become a kidon signature.

When the police came to search Shkaki’s bedroom they found a “Do not disturb” sign on his door – a signature that was repeated in last month’s Dubai killing.