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Friday, April 09, 2010

The camera angle that the Dubai police withheld

Al Arabiya is showing an investigative report on the Mabhouh assassination tonight, and parts of it can be seen on their website.

It does not appear that anything new is being revealed, although there are new claims that DNA of the supposed killers have been found and hair of the alleged assassins were recovered from the room across the hallway.

One of the fascinating parts of the report is that Al Arabiya managed to get the hotel to cooperate and use their closed-circuit TV cameras to tape part of this show, as the reporter goes through the hotel tracing Mabhouh's footsteps, interspersing her footage with the same camera angles we had seen from the Dubai police.

There is one closed-circuit camera angle that is new, however - the one that looks directly at Mabhouh's room!

Here is the reporter seen from her normal video camera outside Mabhouh's room 230 (around seven minutes into the report):

And here she is from the closed-circuit view:

As you can see, the hotel cameras had a clear, direct shot of the hallway where, supposedly, some 27 (or more) spies were hanging around.

And yet we have not yet seen any of that critical footage. All we have seen has been heavily edited scenes from dozens of other cameras, with captions that may or may not be accurate, constructed to tell a narrative.

Why has the Dubai police not released any video from this camera angle? Did the assassins disable that camera? Or was there something else going on that the Dubai authorities do not want the world to know about Mabhouh and his assassination?