Last, week there was another killing suspected to be the work of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. This one was in Budapest, Hungary. The dead man was supposedly involved in money laundering. Hungarian officials have since played down the connection, but it was widely reported there, as well as in Israel and Russia.

“On Wednesday March 17, just after seven in the morning, Dr Bassam Trache, a 52-year-old veterinary surgeon with dual Syrian and Hungarian citizenship, was shot dead in his black Mercedes at a junction in Budapest’s 16th district. The killer grabbed a black briefcase from the car and made off on foot.

Dr Trache, it was revealed, operated a money-changing business. A few years ago he was acquitted in court of attempting to bribe – with jewellery and Arab cakes – the head of the Budapest police’s money-changing investigation division.

At first, his murder was regarded as yet another killing connected with the shady world of money-changing; in the past ten years, there have been no fewer than 123 murders connected with the business in Budapest.

But then a more fantastic theory to explain Dr Trache’s murder emerged.

It transpired that on the very day that Trache was killed, two Israeli Gulfstream V-type jets were spotted flying low over the Hungarian capital, leading to speculation that, just two months after the assassination in Dubai of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Syrian might have been the victim of a Mossad hit…..”

That’s from The First Post ( UK), which goes on to list some of the puzzling inconsistencies in the government’s statements that have been fueling the rumor.

“Last week, however, it was announced that a leading official of the NKH had been sacked, with a further four members of staff disciplined, over their failure to consult Hungary’s secret services before issuing a permit for the Israeli aircraft to enter Hungarian airspace.

And while Szollar claimed that Israel’s flying manoeuvres were merely “routine”, Hungary’s transport minister, Peter Honig, conceded that they were not fully in line with Hungarian laws. Then the Hungary’s HirTV claimed that the Israeli ambassador to Hungary, though denying the term “spy planes”, had referred to the planes as reconnaissance jets.”

The New York Post has reported that the Israeli ambassador told the Hungarian news agency MTI that the jets were on a diplomatic mission and were not spying. The NY Post said the Hungarian government had declined to comment on this response.

Another newspaper, MY Sun, reported that it was Hungarian officials who claimed the jets were on a diplomatic mission.

In a Reuters report, Hungarian spokesman Domokos Szollar stated that the jets were in “routine training” and Israel had cleared the overflights with Hungary two months in advance. Szollar explained the earlier confusion by officials as a case of bad internal communications. Apparently, the Hungarian defense department hadn’t been notified, and so, on first hearing of the flights, PM Gordon Bajnai had ordered an investigation.

The head of Budapest’s criminal investigations team, Zsolt Bodnar, reportedly dismissed allegations about a Mossad link as “fiction.”

I’m going ahead, nonetheless, and posting this video, because it happens to follow two far more substantial stories I’m also watching: the story about documented Mossad links to the murder of a Hamas operative in Dubai, as well as the possible Mossad ties of David Headley, the CIA operative who admitted to being guilty of the Mumbai terror attack of November 2008, at the time blamed on Islamicists. All three events together form a news story that’s quite riveting, especially since it accompanies the continual drum-beat for war with Iran. This story also suggests that any arrests for domestic terrorism need to be looked at with a great deal of skepticism, at this point.

At this point, I should repeat, the forgery of the passports in the killing of the Hamas official is documented; any ties to Headley are very plausible but so far unproven (and have not been reported in the mainstream press, for that’s worth); and the Hungarian story seems to be still in the “allegations” stage.