The Gaza Strip’s ruling Hamas movement said Saturday that an engineer who was gunned down in Malaysia was an important member of the group, amid suspicions that Israel was behind the brazen killing.
Hamas said Fadi al-Batsh, a Palestinian former resident of Jabalya in northern Gaza, was a "loyal" member and a "scientist of Palestine's youth scholars." It gave no further details on his scientific accomplishments but said he had made "important contributions" and participated in international forums in the field of energy.
The movement stopped short of blaming Israel, saying only that he had been "assassinated by the hand of treachery." But in a statement from Gaza, his family said: "We accuse the Mossad of being behind the assassination."
Malaysian police say the 36-year-old Batsh was gunned down early Saturday by two assailants who shot at least eight bullets at close range from a motorbike as he was heading to a mosque for dawn prayers in Kuala Lampur. It said closed-circuit television showed him targeted by assassins who had waited for him for almost 20 minutes. They then fled the scene.
Besides his Hamas affiliation, Batsh was a cousin of Khaled Batsh, a senior official in the Islamic Jihad militant group, which accused the Mossad of the assassination without providing evidence.
Batsh specialized in electrical and electronic engineering and worked at a Malaysian university. He had lived there with his family for the past eight years and was an imam at a local mosque.
He received his Ph.D degree from the University of Malaya in 2015 and was a senior lecturer at the British Malaysian Institute. His official biography said his research interests included power converters, power quality and renewable energy.
However, Israeli media reported that he was also deeply involved in the Hamas drone development project.
In 2015, the Shin Bet security service revealed that Hamas was training Palestinian students in Malaysia.
