CURSE OF MUNICH MASSACRE STRIKES AGAIN
By Sammy Ketz
JERUSALEM, June 9 (AFP) – The murder of PLO security chief Atef Bssiso in Paris on Monday leaves only two of Palestinians suspected of the killing of 11 Israeli athletes the at the 1972 Munich Olympics still alive.
Mohammad Daud Audeh, alias Abu Daud, and Amin al-Hindi are the last survivors of the Black September group set up by the PLO in 1971, according to Maariv newspaper’s military correspondent, quoting Israeli intelligence.
It was named after the month of 1970 when Jordan expelled the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Daud, suspected of coordinating the massacre on the ground, was arrested in Paris in 1977 and released a few days later amid a huge scandal.
He was seriously injured in August 1981 in an attempt on his life at Warsaw and today lives between Baghdad and Damascus, the daily said.
Hindi is the sole survivor among the four men who plotted the Munich bloodshed with Salah Khalaf, nom de guerre Abu Iyad.
Abu Iyad, the founder of Black September, died in a hail of bullets fired by one of his bodyguards in Tunis on January 14, 1991, and which also accounted for his two deputies Hail Abded al-Hamid (Abul Hol) and Abu Mohammad al-Omari.
In “Israel’s Secret History”, Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel quote an Israeli intelligence chief telling his agents to wipe all involved in Munich with the words: “Maybe God forgives; Israel never.”
Prime Minister Golda Meir gave the orders for an unending hunt to track down the killers and Mossad head Zvi Zamir set up two hit squads, named Aleph and Beth after the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Between November 1972 and July 1973, 13 Palestinians were assassinated.
On October 16, 1972, Abdem Wael Zwaiter, was gunned down on the doorstep of his Rome flat. December 7, Mahmud Hamshari died when his telephone blew up, and in January 1973, Hussein Beshir Abul Kheir was killed in his Cyprus hotel room.
Three days later, in the most spectacular operation, Israeli commandos stole into Beirut and murdered three Fatah chiefs — Abu Yussef, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser.
Ehud Barak, today Israel’s chief-of-staff, knocked their door disguised as a Palestinian woman and shot them dead.
But on July 21, 1973, things went badly wrong when Mossad agents killed a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, in the belief he was Ali Hassan Salameh, the brain behind Munich.
As six Israeli intelligence operatives were arrested and put on trial in Norway, the hit squads were called off. But on January 22, 1979, a car bomb killed Salameh in Beirut.
Yossi Melman, a journalist with Haaretz and co-author of the book “All Spies are Princes” does not believe Bssisso was killed for his involvement in Munich.
“Twenty to 30 Palestinians were implicated to varying degrees in the Munich operation,” he said. “Most were killed, and the rest spared either because their roles were minor or because they stayed out of reach.
“The message from that time has gone and I can’t see the Mossad taking a risk over something that happened 20 years ago.”
Israel has never officially admitted responsibility for any of the above.
A government spokesman denied any involvement in Monday’s murder and on Tuesday the Fatah Revolutionary Council of Palestinian extremist Abu Nidal claimed it killed Bssiso for having supplied European intelligence services with details of Palestinian figures.
But it was Israel’s Labour Party leader and retired general Yitzhak Rabin, who recalled in February an old Hebrew saying after the army killed Hezbollah fundamentalist leader Sheikh Abbas Mussawi in Lebanon.
“Never leave an address.”
AFP, June 9, 1992
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