Quick Facts
Biography
Dhahi Khalfan Tamim (born 1 October 1951) is a Lieutenant General and is the Head of General Security for the Emirate of Dubai. He was chief of the Dubai Police Force until the end of the 2013, which is when Khamis Al-Mazeina (died 2016) took over. He came to international attention while overseeing the investigation of the group suspected of the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
Biography
Tamim was born in Dubai on 1 October 1951. He attended the Royal Police College in Amman, Jordan in 1970. He is a criminal investigator.
He was also in-charge of receiving and test driving a new electric police vehicle in 2013.
Positions
- Head of Financial and Administrative Affairs
- Deputy Chief of Dubai Police (1979)
- Chief of Dubai Police (1980)
- Member of Dubai Executive committee
- Deputy Chief of Public security
Controversies
In 2010, Pravda online accused the UAE of adopting " policies against Jews" when, in 1 March of that year, Tamim allegedly said that "anyone who looks or sounds like a citizen of Israel will be blocked from entering the country, even if a suspected individual produces a passport of a different state". Pravda responded by asking the rhetorical question: "Will Emirates liken itself to the Third Reich and use rulers and protractors to measure the shape of the nose, earlaps and the skull structure? If it does, the UAE will lose all of its friends in the West".
He has received criticism for stating that he would alert Israeli authorities if he learned of a planned terrorist attack on their soil. Furthermore, in July 2013, he received criticism for contesting the notion that Israel was the enemy of Arabs by declaring that the Muslim Brotherhood pose a significantly more substantial threat.
He is a major critic of Qatar's support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in April 2014, stated that “Qatar should not be ‘a safe haven’ to the so-called ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood”. Additionally, he noted that the UAE should 'reclaim' Qatar. This caused already-strained relations between Emirates and Qatar to further deteriorate. He also launched a verbal attack against Kuwait in March 2014, accusing Kuwait of "destroying Iraq".
In 2015, he was publicly rebuked by Emirati minister of foreign affairs Abdullah bin Zayed on Twitter as a result of expressing support for former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. He also criticised the tactics employed by coalition forces during the 2015 intervention in Yemen.