The chase through the London Zoo takes place at night. However the insert shots of various animals were clearly shot in broad daylight.
The interior of the Rolls Royce at the beginning changes between shots.
At the end, David clings to a sweep (pole) stuck in lake's bottom, as his boat drifts a couple yards away. After a closeup on Yasmin's face as she reacts to his response that he cannot swim a stroke, the view returns to David, and the boat is close enough that he can fall onto the back of it and slide off it into the water.
When the helicopter is on the viaduct, the river in the valley below (the Ebbw in Wales) is a vivid orange brown. When the helicopter crashes, it plunges into a river that is deeper, wider, and cleaner.
Near the beginning, when Pollock is in the limo with the Prime Minister, the glass partition is raised, and it is very dark such that the driver cannot be seen. Moments later, when the ambassador taps on the glass signaling to stop the car, the glass is clear.
There is no reference to the movie's title, "Arabesque". The references are all to the original book by Alex Gordon (pseudonym of Gordon Cotler), which was titled "The Cipher".
Sloan says he was with the 42nd Highland Fusiliers. The 42nd is, in fact, the Black Watch, and no one from that regiment would ever refer to themselves as anything other than the Black Watch.
In the opening sequence, when the fake doctor examines professor Ragheeb, he applies the ophthalmologist's trial frame over the patient's own glasses. This would make a examination and/or vision text impossible. The patient's own spectacles must be removed first.
In the aquarium, Mustafa is shot with a revolver fitted with a silencer. Silencers do not work on revolvers, only automatic pistols. This does not mean, however, that a silencer cannot be fitted to a revolver, only it is less efficient, and there existed cases of suppressed revolvers.
The hieroglyphic script in the code is mislabeled as "Hittite" by the main character. Hieroglyphs such as those shown on screen were indeed called Hittite for some time in scholarly studies, until the language they encode was proved to be Luwian (a close relative to Hittite, although a different language). Hittite language was written in cuneiform script, and there is no proved link between said script and Luwian hieroglyphs.
However, after Professor Pollock is able to crack the code, he tells Yasmin that, "It's a phony; 100% phony. It isn't Hittite at all. It's an ordinary, commoner garden, grade-school code."
After the man has been drowned in the fish tank, there are several shots of the actors with the tank in the background. In all but one of the shots, the drowned man is seen floating on the surface. In the goofed shot, the drowned man can be seen swimming toward the side of the tank.
During most of the dash to the airport to prevent the assassination, it is pouring rain out of a cloudless blue sky.
When David and Yasmin are escaping from a helicopter, the filming crew is visible on the right side of a bridge (in the helicopters' POV)
During the final chase, the helicopter continues to fly past and around the characters on the bridge, while the bad guys attempt to shoot them from the air. If the helicopter had just hovered in place, the shooters likely would have been able to kill the three on the bridge.
The Arab character Beshraavi mispronounces the name Mustafa. An Arab educated in English would still say Arab names in their original pronunciation.