until captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, when he moved to Jordan and joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He later admitted to this paper that he had been in contact with them as a "sleeper" of the PLO's largest Arafat-led sub-group, Fatah, of which he was one of the founders. He claimed to have taken part in the Al-Karama battle in 1968 when Israeli forces, using air cover, attacked refugee camps run by the PLO inside Jordan near the village of al-Karama – the first time Palestinian "resistance" fought the Israeli army face to face instead of the hit-and-run or bomb-planting operations they started in January 1965.
He had major disagreements with Arafat over priorities. While Arafat exploited the contradictions between Arab regimes, Oudeh was more of a revolutionary puritan who saw regimes who were not aiding the Palestinians, or who were making bilateral peace deals with Israel, as "enemies who should be fought".
He went underground into Lebanon via Syria in 1970, moving between Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and then to Europe. After the 1972 attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and moved back to Lebanon in early 1975. When the Lebanon civil war broke out later that year, he participated for a few months, then moved to Jordan. He moved to Ramallah in the West Bank following the 1993 Palestinian Israeli Oslo peace accords.
Upon reading his memoirs, the Israelis banned him from returning to Ramallah following a trip to see his doctor in Amman. He finally settled in Syria – the only country that would take him, and the most militant regime country in the anti-peace Arab bloc.
Oudeh narrowly escaped assassination in what he claimed to be a Mossad operation in a hotel lobby in Warsaw in 1981. Despite being shot several times in his left wrist, chest, stomach and jaw, he chased his assassin (who claimed to be a Palestinian double agent), to the hotel entrance, where he collapsed.
He belonged to a group of hard men who founded the PLO in 1965 and believed that armed struggle must not be given up as an option beside negotiation. In his last interview, with Al-jazeera in 1999, he said he would carry out the Munich attack all over again as he had no regrets, remaining militant to the end. "Today, I cannot fight you anymore,'' he said in a statement to the Israelis shortly before his death of a kidney failure, "but my grandson will and his grandsons, too."
Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud), politician and militia commander; born Jerusalem 1937; married (five daughters, one son); died Damascus 3 July 2010.
Adel Darwish
Wednesday, 2 December 2015
‘NOT JUST A HOSTAGE STORY’
The Israeli Olympic team members held hostage by Black September militants at the 1972 Olympic Games were beaten, tortured – and in one case, castrated – during the siege that eventually ended in the Israelis’ deaths, their widows have said.
In a new documentary on the Munich Massacre, Munich 1972 & Beyond, Ankie Spitzer, widow of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, explains in an interview that the tragedy was “not just a hostage story”.
Speaking to the New York Daily News, Steven Ungerleider, Olympic historian and one of the documentary’s creators, recalled Ms Spitzer’s interview for the film: “[She said] I think you should know this was not just a hostage story and horrific murder in the Olympic Village – there was torture, our husbands were beaten, and God knows what else.”
At the September 1972 Games, two members of the Israeli Olympic team - wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and champion weight lifter Yossef Romano – were shot and killed in the Olympic village when eight Black September terrorists stormed the team’s apartments armed with assault rifles and grenades. They then took nine Israelis hostage.
Ms Spitzer told the New York Times the hostages were beaten, some to the point that their bones were broken. Mr Romano apparently tried to overpower one of the terrorists, which is when he was shot.
“What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him,” Ms Romano told the newspaper. “Can you imagine the nine others sitting around tied up? They watched this.”
The Olympic team’s widows discovered what happened to their husbands during the siege over 20 years ago when a series of photographs of the aftermath were released along with German police files during litigation proceedings.
Some details of the torture were reported on 10 years ago when the LA Times obtained copies of the images, but the women have not spoken publicly about their husbands’ torture until now.
It has not been established whether Mr Romano was castrated before or after he was killed, but Ms Romano told the newspaper she believes her husband was already dead when it happened.
The Black September terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had demanded 234 people be released from Israeli prisons – and two from a German prison – in return for the release of the hostages.
But the ordeal ended with the death of the nine hostages, five terrorists and one German policeman in a bungled police attempt to ambush the Palestinian militants as they tried to escape from Munich’s military airfield.
Three gunmen were arrested in the ambush, but were released three months later when Black September members hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Middle East, promising to blow it up unless their members were released.
The 1972 Olympic Games were suspended for 24 hours and a memorial service held for the members of the Israeli team.
The attack led to a series of Palestinian assassinations by Israel’s Mossad agents. Abu Daoud, also called Mohammed Oudeh, the mastermind of the operation, died in Damascus of kidney failure in 2010.
The documentary focuses on the 43-year fight by the families of the victims for recognition of those killed in the events carried out by the guerrilla group, and its release is expected to coincide with the opening of a memorial for the 11 Israelis in Munich, the New York Daily News reports.
Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith
CHAPTER 3
‘CELEBRITY’ TERRORISTS
Protesting killing of Osama Bin Laden, Quetta, Pakistan, 2 May 2011.
CARLOS THE JACKAL
Tuesday, 23 December 1997
SENTENCED TO LIFE
To the end, the real Ilich Ramirez Sanchez never quite stood up.
Over the eight days of his trial, the former global Public Enemy Number One put on a series of masks: the committed "professional revolutionary"; the urbane socialite; the educated man of the world; the lawyer manque; the admirer and friend of France; the self-pitying victim of imperialist conspiracy; the gallant lady's man; the bigoted anti-Semite.
Even after hearing the verdict he merely smiled, shook his fist in the air four times and said "Viva la revolucion" before walking out of the courtroom escorted by police guards.
The nine-member jury had taken four hours before convicting him of shooting Raymond Dous, Jean Donatini and Michel Moukharbal, a Lebanese colleague of Carlos in a student apartment near the Sorbonne.
But Ramirez had given a brief glimpse
