IRAN, PAKISTAN: Death of consular official in Peshawar raises stakes

He was leaving his home in Peshawar on his way to work this morning. That's when the motorcycles zipped by. A hail of gunfire ensued. Left behind by the gunmen were shell casings and the bullet-riddled body of Abul Hassan Jaffry, an employee at Iran's consulate in Peshawar.

The Pakistani citizen, the consul's public affairs chief, was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported that Jaffry was shot at least four times. Local police in Peshawar said no one spotted the attackers, who, according to witnesses, disappeared on their motorcycles after opening fire on Jaffry. 

LEBANON: Israel admits spying on its northern neighbor

Israel has openly admitted to collecting intelligence in Lebanon, an uncharacteristically frank admission and a slap in the face of its neighbor.

Of course, everyone spies on everyone in the Middle East. 

But in the past, for the sake of politesse, Israel has refused to acknowledge mounting espionage operations in Lebanon, although their existence is an open secret.

Lebanon has arrested dozens of alleged spies working for Israel this year alone, and recently found and destroyed a number of eavesdropping devices attached to Hezbollah's communications network. 

At the time, Israel said allegations of spying "did not warrant a serious response."

But during a recent visit to the volatile border separating Israel from Lebanon, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon confirmed Israel's information-gathering activities in Lebanon, which he said targeted Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia and political organization that maintains de facto control over southern Lebanon.

"The moment Hezbollah renewed their attacks, we began to collect intelligence. ... We will stop when Hezbollah disarms itself and the border is a border of peace," Ya'alon said, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

"When we are in conflict with an enemy, we gather information about them," he added.

IRAN: Grim fates for prisoners with ties to foreigners

No mercy for those accused of trying to topple the Islamic Republic.

Britain on Thursday protested a four-year jail sentence apparently imposed on one of its senior employees at its embassy in Tehran accused of spying and fomenting violence. 

Hossein Rassam, 44, who served as chief political analyst at the British Embassy in Tehran was sentenced in a closed courtroom earlier this week, according to The Times of London. 

British authorities were informed of the sentence Tuesday and have summoned the Iranian ambassador while Britain’s ambassador to Iran has filed a complaint with Iranian authorities. The outcome of the trial has yet to be officially announced. 

In other developments, an Iranian human rights group is claiming that judiciary officials in Iran refuse to let a lawyer file an appeal on behalf of Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American scholar sentenced to 15 years in jail for allegedly stirring up trouble during recent protests. 

And a vacation video (above) said to “prove the innocence” of three American hikers detained in Iran since the summer has been released online. 

Not all the news is grim. Iranian authorities recently released Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek reporter and Iranian Canadian who was arrested in the post-election unrest.

UAE: Government to create DNA database of all residents, starting with children

Within a year, the United Arab Emirates will become the first country to begin building a national DNA database of all residents, the Abu Dhabi-based National newspaper reported today.

Authorities say the program will help solve and prevent crimes, but critics see the database as a potentially dangerous violation of civil liberties, especially because the program is expected to be initiated as a security directive, thus bypassing the legislative process entirely.

Dr. Ahmed Marzooqi, the program's director, said lab technicians will begin swabbing cheeks of the general public as soon as the infrastructure is in place, starting with priority groups like minors.

“Most criminals start when they are young," Marzooqi said. "If we can identify them at that age, then we can help in their rehabilitation before the level of their crimes increase."

But Sir Alec Jeffreys, the British geneticist who invented the technology, questioned the ethics of the UAE's planned database, calling for a “full transparent justification of why a universal database is needed compared with a criminal DNA database." 

The National points out that although the UAE is home to a large and transient expatriate population, the DNA profiles would be stored in the database indefinitely, and that some information could be shared with other governments or Interpol, depending on specific treaties or cooperation agreements.

Marzooqi maintained the government is taking privacy concerns very seriously, and will implement "strict usage rules and will take secondary tests in court cases to verify the identity matches.”

-- Meris Lutz in Beirut

Image: DNA detail. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

UAE: Former Syrian spy sentenced to jail time, deportation

Abu Dhabi's supreme court sentenced former Syrian intelligence officer Mohammad Zuhair Siddiq to six months in jail and deportation for entering the United Arab Emirates on a fake Czech passport that Siddiq claims was given to him by French intelligence.

Siddiq, once a star witness in the international tribunal investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, is suspected of giving false information in an attempt to implicate Syria in the explosion that killed Hariri and 22 others in 2005. Since then, investigators for the tribunal have dismissed Siddiq's testimony, and warrants for his arrest have been issued by the Lebanese and Syrian governments.

Siddiq's lawyer, Fahd Al-Sabhan, indicated to local reporters that he will fight the deportation sentence if it means his client will be handed over to Syrian authorities, which would be tantamount to extradition.

SAUDI ARABIA: Will new university bring freedoms?

Saudi Arabia’s first coeducational university, a graduate research institution known as the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, is a test of “whether the kingdom is prepared to expand academic freedoms and women’s rights,” said Human Rights Watch.

The university, which opened Wednesday, is located about 50 miles north of the Red Sea city of Jidda. The Saudi-based English-language daily Arab News featured a glowing -- some would say glorifying -- account of the inauguration ceremony:

“Breathtaking, spectacular and just amazing." That is how Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony of the multibillion-dollar King Abdullah University of Science and Technology was described by a large section of the nearly 3,000 guests that included prominent Saudis, foreign leaders, Nobel laureates, researchers, scientists and journalists.”

IRAN: Book says U.S. spies pump Dubai visa applicants for intel

The CIA stepped in to prevent the United States from closing a consulate in the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai, arguing that it was a gold mine of human intelligence from Iran.

That's according to a new book, “City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism,” by former Associated Press correspondent Jim Krane.

The State Department tried “more than once” to shut down its consular services office in Dubai for budget reasons.

But it ran up against the resistance of senior intelligence officials. 

For decades, they'd been gleaning precious information about Iran by grilling hundreds of Iranian visa applicants, according to the book.

The CIA several times over the years managed to convince the State Department to make cuts elsewhere, Krane writes in the book, released in the U.S. this week. 

Iranians applying for U.S. visas in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai are “monitored, interrogated and, sometimes, recruited into spying on their own government” by Iran specialists and Farsi speakers working for the CIA or other American agencies, the book says. 

Those with Iranian military or government backgrounds are asked to return time and again, with agents “pressing them to collect more and deeper details,” while holding out the possibility of a U.S. visa so they can visit friends and family or consider emigration, Krane writes. 

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: Government bugs BlackBerrys with spy program

When BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates were urged to download what they thought was a routine software upgrade, they had no idea that by doing so they were installing a surveillance program that gives the state-controlled service provider Etisalat unfettered access to their personal mobile devices.

After finding out, over half of Etisalat’s customers, many of whom conduct sensitive business on their BlackBerrys, say they intend to cancel their contracts immediately, according to a poll conducted by Arabian Business and published by local tech-news website itp.net, which has been following the story closely.

The spyware was traced to SS8, an American company specializing in what it calls "lawful interception."

On Tuesday, the Canadian company that makes BlackBerry issued a statement denying any connection to the bugged application.

“Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry, but rather to send received messages back to a central server,” the statement read.

LEBANON: Hezbollah draws former Israeli collaborators back home

With Lebanon still reeling from the discovery of multiple Israeli spy networks, local media is now reporting that Hezbollah and its allies are repatriating former Israeli collaborators who fled over the border to avoid prosecution in Lebanon.

It's a surprising move for Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently called for Israeli spies to be executed.

LEBANON: Report linking Hezbollah to Hariri assassination raises questions

In a bombshell report published Saturday, the German weekly Der Spiegel says the investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is moving toward the conclusion that the Shiite militia Hezbollah was behind the attack.

Based entirely on an unnamed source or sources, the Spiegel report said Lebanese investigators monitoring cellphone usage in the vicinity of the car-bomb explosion that killed Hariri lucked into a breakthrough discovery.

According to the report, the cellphones were used exclusively for phone calls among the alleged assassins except for one instance when one of the suspects used a phone to call his girlfriend. 

From that single call, investigators figured out the name of the  operative. Allegedly, he was Abdul Majid Ghamlush, described as an Iranian-trained agent who belongs to a "special forces" unit of Hezbollah, according to the report, which then goes on to link him to higher-ups in Hezbollah, including a commander named Hajj Salim.