Yehuda Lustig

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Glasgow-born Israeli soldier killed in 1973 whose identity was used for the British passport of "Christopher Lockwood", a suspect in the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Yehuda Lustig

Image Yehuda Lustig Izkor.jpg
Yehuda Lustig, from the Israeli Ministry of Defence memorial site
Born 23 February 1948 52 Marywood Square, Strathbungo, Glasgow, Scotland
Died 10 October 1973 Halutz hill near the Abu Kteira stronghold, Suez Canal, Israeli-occupied Egyptian Sinai
Nationality Israeli
Occupation Soldier, Israel Defense Forces Armored Corps (reserves); computer student
Known for Identity used for the "Christopher Lockwood" British passport in the Assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh
Parents Martin Lustig and Betty Lustig (née Frohlich)
Spouse(s) Kokhava Lustig

Yehuda Lustig (23 February 1948 – 10 October 1973) was an Israeli soldier, born in Glasgow, who was killed in the 1973 war in Israeli-occupied Egyptian Sinai.[1] In 1994 a British passport identity in his name was changed by deed poll to "Christopher Lockwood". A man using that genuine passport was named by Dubai Police and Interpol in 2010 as a suspect in the assassination of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an operation widely attributed to Mossad.[2]

"Lockwood" was never traced. According to people familiar with the inquiry quoted by the Wall Street Journal, he had acted for years in Europe and the Middle East as a facilitator for the team that killed al-Mabhouh.[2] British officials quoted by The National in 2012 called him an "illegal" and "a real 'Day of the Jackal' figure".[3]

Glasgow

According to an appeal placed in the Jewish Telegraph in September 2010 by the Wall Street Journal reporter Alistair MacDonald, Martin Lustig married Betty Frohlich in June 1935 "in what was then-Palestine and moved to Glasgow". The appeal said Martin was "a veterinary student" and that the couple lived at 52 Marywood Square, Glasgow, where their son Yehuda was born in February 1948.[4] The Wall Street Journal later reported that his birth certificate gave Glasgow and 23 February 1948, and that his father "was a veterinary student who had married in Palestine, then under British control".[2]

Sources disagree on how the family came to Glasgow. The Jewish Telegraph appeal described them as a family "which arrived in Glasgow after the Second World War".[4] The Israeli Ministry of Defence memorial says the family travelled to Glasgow from Mandate Palestine for the father's studies and returned when Yehuda was a year old.[1] In May 2010 the Daily Record was reported as saying that the father was "a Jewish Palestinian who migrated to the UK just after World War One".[5] The Israeli news site Ynet described the parents as "a British couple".[6]

The house, then 25 Moray Place, was renumbered as 52 Princes Square in 1930 and renamed 52 Marywood Square in 1932. It was the home of the carpet importer Barnet Shenkin and his wife Freda Shenkin, who lived there from about 1925 until after 1949. The local historian Andrew Downie writes that the Lustigs "were Jewish emigres after the war who lodged with the Shenkins".[7] In April 1948 the Jewish Chronicle recorded a "Mrs. B. Shenkin" making a presentation to the president of the Glasgow Women's Zionist Organisation at its twentieth-anniversary dinner.[8]

Life in Israel and death

The Ministry of Defence memorial says his parents named him Yehuda because it was the name they had expected the coming state to take. He went to primary school in Beersheba and then at the Pines school in Gedera, where the family settled, and to the United (HaMeuhad) high school in Rehovot. He was a member of Maccabi.[1]

He was conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces on 8 May 1966 and posted to the Armored Corps.[9] In the June 1967 war he fought on the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel captured and has occupied since, and he later served with an armoured battalion during the War of Attrition.[1] After his regular service he commanded an armoured personnel carrier (APC) in an Armored Corps reconnaissance battalion of the reserves.[1] His widow, Kokhava, told Ynet that he was a third-year computer student and that they had been married for seven weeks when he was called up.[6]

On 10 October 1973, during the October 1973 war, his APC was hit by two shoulder-fired missiles in fighting at the "Abu Kteira" stronghold on "Halutz" hill, in the northern sector of the Suez Canal in Israeli-occupied Egyptian Sinai. He and five other soldiers were killed. The APC was left in territory taken by Egyptian forces, and his body was recovered only months later. He is buried in the military plot at Gedera cemetery and was posthumously promoted to sergeant first class.[1][9]

The "Christopher Lockwood" passport

On 19 January 2010 al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of the military wing of Hamas, was killed in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai. Dubai police said 33 suspects used 45 passports, 19 of them British.[2] Most were forged or cloned, but one was a genuine British passport in the name of Christopher Lockwood, 62. In May 2010 Dubai issued a warrant for him and Interpol published a notice seeking him.[10] The notice gave his date of birth as 23 February 1948, Yehuda Lustig's birthday. The Daily Record reported finding no Scottish birth record for a Christopher Lockwood that year.[5] A Foreign Office spokeswoman would not comment on him specifically.[5]

According to the Wall Street Journal, Dubai police linked Lockwood to the operation through a white minivan with tinted windows, identified from a reflection on hotel CCTV and from vehicle-registration and toll-road records, which had been rented to him. He had also rented a car and a short-term flat in Dubai. Dubai officials believed he bought ferry tickets for two other suspects who travelled from Dubai to Iran in August 2009. In 2008, using a British address, he had shipped a blue Mercedes van from Sharjah to Iran.[2]

British investigators found that Lockwood had changed his name from Yehuda Lustig in 1994. They found his London address and watched it, but he never returned. The Journal reported that he had no public-health or tax records and had never paid a television licence.[2] A cellphone linked to him had been switched on in France, but he was not found there either.[2] In 2012 an official told The National that for 15 years he had lived "near an international railway station" with "not the tightest" passport control, and that after the killing "he was never seen again".[3]

The Journal found that Lustig's military record, described in "six Israeli memorials, including an official obituary posted on the Israeli Ministry of Defense's website", showed he had died in 1973. It concluded that "an unknown person fraudulently used the dead soldier's identity to obtain a British passport".[2] On NPR, MacDonald said "it was actually us who turned up this fact". He added that, according to the paper's sources, Lockwood operated as "a sort of a fix-it guy, allegedly for Mossad in the U.K. and in France", and "wasn't involved in the actual assassination".[11] The National reported in 2012 that it was investigators from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) who found that the real Lustig had been killed. It also gave his year of birth as 1946, not 1948.[3]

Ynet reported that a person with the same name and the same year of birth and immigration details was still listed as living at 10 Allenby Street, Tel Aviv, an address with no residential flats.[12] His widow told Ynet that the reports came on the anniversary of his death: "It was very unpleasant to wake up to these reports. I don't know how to take it all, what it means from my point of view, why they did it."[6]

Was Lustig Lockwood?

On the day the Journal story appeared, the blogger Issandr El Amrani wrote on The Arabist that the published photographs of Lustig and Lockwood "could very well be the same man, 40 years apart", and speculated that "Maybe Lustig never died in 1973, but was simply made to disappear so he could more easily operate as an agent".[13] This is contradicted by the Israeli memorial record that his body was recovered and buried at Gedera, and by his widow's account.[1][6] MacDonald said it "makes little sense for Yehuda Lustig to change his name and pretend he's dead, you can only assume that his ID was cloned".[11]

British government response

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced an investigation into the use of British passports on 17 February 2010.[14] On 23 March 2010 the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, told the House of Commons that SOCA had concluded that the British passports used "were copied from genuine British passports when handed over for inspection to individuals linked to Israel". He said there were "compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of British passports" and that a member of the Israeli embassy would be withdrawn.[14] Miliband said the 12 British passport holders SOCA interviewed were "wholly innocent victims of identity theft". He refused to describe the role of the expelled official, saying only that the UK, not Israel, had chosen him and that the choice was not random.[14] The Guardian reported that the official was a senior Mossad agent.[15] In 2012 a senior British diplomat told The National that SOCA's investigation made it clear "that Mossad was behind it" and that the man expelled was "the Mossad station chief".[3]

The Commons statement dealt with the cloned passports and did not mention Lockwood's genuine one, which came to light two months later.[14][10] Miliband told MPs that SOCA's inquiry "was confined to the passport counterfeiting, cloning and so on" and was not an investigation into the killing.[14] No public explanation has been given of how a British passport came to be issued in 1994 in the name of a man who died in 1973.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Israeli Ministry of Defence, יהודה לוסטיג (Yehuda Lustig), Izkor, accessed 10 November 2026.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Chip Cummins and Alistair MacDonald, In Hunt for Dubai Hit Men, Tantalizing Trail Goes Cold, Wall Street Journal, 8 October 2010, accessed 10 November 2026. Full text also reproduced at ruthfullyyours.com.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Carol Huang, Iran concern took heat off Mabhouh assassins, The National, 19 January 2012, accessed 10 November 2026.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Jewish Telegraph, "Glasgow arrivals", Roots, 17 September 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 IRNA, Mystery over Scot wanted in Mossad assassination, 25 May 2010, via GlobalSecurity.org, accessed 10 November 2026.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Ynetnews (Reuters), Report: Mabhouh killer used fallen IDF soldier's identity, 10 October 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
  7. ↑ Andrew Downie, 52 Marywood Square, Bygone Bungo, 15 December 2024, accessed 10 November 2026.
  8. ↑ Jewish Chronicle, 9 April 1948, Glasgow news, issue scan, Internet Archive, accessed 10 November 2026.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, סמ"ר יהודה לוסטיג ז"ל (Sgt. 1st Class Yehuda Lustig), Gal-Ed memorial, accessed 10 November 2026.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 CBS News, UAE Seeks Briton in Hamas Official's Dubai Slay, 24 May 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 NPR, International Hit Man's True Identity A Mystery, All Things Considered, 16 October 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
  12. ↑ Ynet, "מחסלי מבחוח השתמשו בזהות חלל צה"ל" ("Mabhouh's killers used the identity of a fallen IDF soldier"), 10 October 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
  13. ↑ Issandr El Amrani, WSJ on the Mabhouh assassination, The Arabist, 8 October 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 Hansard, UK Passports (Use in Dubai Murder), HC Deb 23 March 2010, vol 508, accessed 10 November 2026.
  15. ↑ Julian Borger, Britain expels Mossad agent over forged passport plot, The Guardian, 23 March 2010, accessed 10 November 2026.
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