A man suspected of assisting in the targeted killing of Hamas rocket engineer Fadi al-Batsh in Malaysia in 2018 has been arrested, Hamas reported Sunday.
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According to Hamas, the man is a resident of the Gaza Strip and has admitted to helping the Mossad target al-Batsh.
The Al-Batsh family welcomed the news and said that "Allah is happy that the murderer of Fadi, our shahid [martyr], has been revealed, and is now with the security forces in Gaza."
The family said that it would not speak out against the family of "the traitorous murderer, who was a tool in the hands of the Israeli Mossad, the main suspect in the killing of the shahid."
In April 2018, al-Batsh, 35, was fatally shot by two assassins while on his way to a mosque in a suburb of Kuala Lumpar.
After the killing, Malaysian authorities announced they had located the getaway car and the weapons used to kill him, and said that the government believed that the killers had used forged Serbian and Montenegrin passports to enter the country.
The newspaper Rai Al-Youm reported that Hamas' security forces had apprehended the suspect in a special operation after he entered the Gaza Strip. Once there, he reportedly phoned an Israeli security officer, who paid him for his part in the targeted killing of al-Batsh. According to the report, the Israeli contact asked the suspect where he was.
Upon hearing that the man was calling from Gaza, the Israeli was alarmed and asked him, "What have you done? Why did you go back to Gaza?"
The report said that the suspect was surprised to learn that Hamas' security forces had been listening in on the conversation, after which he was arrested immediately.
"The agent admitted right away that he carried out the action in Malaysia with two [other] people, at the behest of the Mossad, and he was the one who shot al-Batsh," the report said.
Meanwhile, other sources told Al Jazeera that the suspect had spied for Israel for a number of years, as well as assisting in Mossad operations outside the Gaza Strip.
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