WARSAW (AFP-EJP)---A Polish judge has ruled to extradite an alleged Israeli Mossad agent to Germany over claims he was linked to the January killing of a Hamas chief which caused a diplomatic storm.
The January 20 assassination in Dubai of Mahmud al-Mabhuh angered Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and Australia after the team of assassins -- widely believed to be from the Israeli spy agency Mossad -- were found to have used 26 forged passports.
London, Canberra and Dublin each expelled an Israeli diplomat over the scandal.
Seven masked and heavily armed Polish anti-terrorist police officers escorted Uri Brodsky into the Warsaw court for the closed-door hearing. He was in handcuffs and his face was covered.
"The court has decided to hand over Uri Brodsky to German authorities for judicial procedures there," Warsaw regional court Judge Tomasz Calkiewicz said following the hearing attended by Brodsky.
"The court did not decide whether Brodsky committed the crime for which he is under investigation, the court only checked whether the extradition request fulfils the formal requirements and whether the suspect is correctly identified," he said.
According to German weekly Der Spiegel, which broke the story on its website last month, Brodsky was arrested by Polish authorities on an international arrest warrant at Warsaw airport on June 4 on suspicion of obtaining a German passport by fraudulent means.
The passport was used by people involved in the Dubai hit on Mabhuh, the founder of the military wing of Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas which controls the Gaza Strip.
The court said Brodsky had three days to appeal the decision, but the suspect's lawyer said it was not immediately clear whether an appeal would be launched.
"My client can be handed over to German judicial authorities within the framework of judicial procedures over the following matters: falsification of documents and using false documents," Brodsky's lawyer Krzysztof Stepinski told reporters immediately after the ruling.
"But the court did not take into consideration the German extradition request over participation in activities for foreign spy services," Stepinski said.
Mabhuh was found dead in his room in the Al Bustan Rotana hotel near Dubai airport.
Germany issued an international arrest warrant for Brodsky several weeks ago.
For historical reasons spanning back to the Second World War, Brodsky's arrest has also proved a tricky diplomatic issue for Poland as Israel has urged Warsaw to send Brodsky home rather than to hand him over to its neighbour and EU partner Germany.
Tricky diplomatic issue for Polish PM Donald Tusk
"Poland needs to tell Germany that it is sending an Israeli citizen to Israel and if there is some complaint against him, we have legal procedures (that) have great credibility with the international legal system," Israel's Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov said last month. He was echoed by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has, however, said he hoped to avoid diplomatic fallout from Poland's actions in the case.
"I don't need to explain to anyone how delicate this case is, given the historical issues in this triangle between Poland, Israel and Germany," Tusk said in June, in an apparent reference to Nazi-era Germany's World War II occupation of Poland and genocide of the Jews.
"The law doesn't give Polish justice much room for manoeuvre," he said. "We don't want this case to have any negative impact on Polish-Israeli and Polish-German relations."
The extradition case could adversely affect German-Israeli relations.
Officials in Berlin had said at the time that the Israeli secret service went too far in obtaining the German passport for alleged use in the murder Mabhuh, especially as they apparently used a fake story of Nazi persecution to get it.
Uri Brodsky, who is to be extradited to Germany, could face up to five years in prison. It would deal a major blow to German-Israeli relations if a German court, under the eyes of the world's media, sent a Jewish agent to prison because he worked for the Mossad.