The L.A. Times has an interesting story about the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai in January.

One of the most striking aspects of the affair was how quickly the Dubai police pieced together a fairly detailed narrative of how it all went down. Striking, because this was after all (allegedly) the handiwork of the rightly feared and respected Mossad. Who did such a sloppy job that they left clumsy fingerprints all over the place.

More than anything else, what enabled the Dubai police to crack the case was the Big Brother society they have constructed:

Dubai’s cameras never blink. The security system allows law enforcement to track anyone, from the moment they get off an airplane, to the immigration counter where their passport is scanned, through the baggage claim area to the taxi stand where cameras record who gets into what cars, which log their locations through the city’s automated highway toll system, all the way to their hotels, which also have cameras.

Which brings us to the Bustan Rotana hotel on the night of Jan. 19, and an assassination made to look like a run-of-the-mill heart attack.

The dead man, as the world now knows, was a 50-year-old Hamas commander named Mahmoud Mabhouh, wanted by Israel in the killing of two Israeli soldiers. Once Dubai investigators narrowed the time of death to 8 to 8:30 p.m., they quickly found that seven people in the Bustan Rotana had no business being there.

Using facial recognition software, a source familiar with the investigation said, a team of 20 investigators pored over hours of security camera videos to sketch out a picture of the suspects’ movements and accomplices, a group that has grown to at least 27 people.

They tracked down taxi drivers and grilled them about the suspects. They even traced the trip of a female suspect to a shopping center and discovered what she bought.

For years, the United Arab Emirates has been using its considerable oil wealth to build up its defense and security infrastructure, including the National Security Agency, the secret police, which is playing a key role in the investigation.

“They buy the best,” said Kamal Awar, a retired Lebanese army officer and editor of Beirut-based Defense 21, a regional military magazine. “They bought the latest technology in satellite and communications.”

The other big factor, apparently, was Mossad hubris. Knowing that you are rightly feared and respected, it turns out, can make you cocky and, therefore, sloppy. The whole plan seems to have been predicated on the assumption that murder wouldn’t even be suspected. The assassination was scripted to look like a heart attack; they seem to have assumed that there wouldn’t even be an investigation. So why even bother to cover your tracks?

Of course, the dirty unwashed Arabs not only quickly figured out that there were suspicious circumstances, they went on to pretty effortlessly crack the whole case wide open PDQ.

Here’s the script, as it was written:

The middle-aged man was splayed out dead in his hotel room as if he’d gone into cardiac arrest. The door was chained from the inside. Coroners surmised that he’d died of natural causes.
[...]
The assailants apparently entered the hotel room without any struggle, suggesting that someone on the team knew Mabhouh. A fatal dose of the powerful muscle relaxant succinylcholine quickly paralyzes its recipient and ultimately mimics the effects of a heart attack. It should have killed Mabhouh within 15 minutes.

But something must have gone wrong, said the source with knowledge of the investigation, because the assassins pressed a pillow against Mabhouh’s face for one or two minutes until he suffocated. “They were panicking for one reason or another,” said the source.

The hit team tidied up the room and laid Mabhouh out as though he’d suffered a massive heart attack and dropped dead.

And this is all it took for it to come unraveled:

But one doctor noticed an abnormality in the blood. He later spotted strange puncture marks on a leg and behind an ear. And after the Palestinian militant group Hamas informed Dubai authorities that the dead man was Mahmoud Mabhouh, they decided it couldn’t hurt to double-check. Blood samples were sent abroad. Days passed.

When the toxicology reports showed that he’d been given a lethal dose of a powerful anesthetic, Dubai authorities knew they had a high-profile homicide on their hands. Though Mabhouh was no friend of the Emirates, authorities were furious about the killing.

“The whole operation was based on one key assumption: that the death will be recorded as a natural death,” Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center, a Dubai think tank, said of the assassins. “And that was the downfall. The reason why they were so careless was because they thought there would be no investigation.”

At least half of the passports used by the 27 suspects bore the names and registration numbers of Israeli dual citizens who held British, Irish, Australian, French or German passports, leading many experts to believe that Israel’s spy outfit, Mossad, had forged the identities.

Israeli officials have been tight-lipped about the case and refused to confirm or deny the nation’s involvement.

The hubris that led to swift unraveling may be based on having successfully pulled the same stunt before, without arousing any suspicion:

Authorities are now reexamining the death of Faisal Husseini, a charismatic Palestinian leader who died in his Kuwait hotel room in 2001.

“Now we know their tradecraft,” said Alani. “We know how they operate.”

If Kuwait is as Big Brother-y as Dubai, this may not count as a cold case.