Black September (group) - Munich Massacre

Munich Massacre

The group's most infamous operation was the killing of 11 Israeli athletes, nine of whom were first taken hostage, and the killing of a German police officer, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Black September's official name for the operation was "Ikrit and Biram", after the names of two Palestinian Christian villages whose residents had been killed or expelled by the Israeli military Haganah in 1948.

Following the attack, the Israeli government, headed by Prime Minister Golda Meir, ordered Mossad to assassinate those known to have been involved. What was then known as Operation Bayonet had begun. By 1979, during what became known as Operation Wrath of God, at least one Mossad unit had assassinated eight PLO members. Among them was the leading figure of Ali Hassan Salameh, nicknamed the "Red Prince," the wealthy, flamboyant son of an upper-class family, and commander of Force 17, Yasser Arafat's personal security squad. Salameh was behind the 1972 hijacking of Sabena Flight 572 from Vienna to Lod. He was killed by a car bomb in Beirut on 22 January 1979. In Operation Spring of Youth, in April 1973, Israeli commandos killed three senior members of Black September in Beirut. In July 1973, in what became known as the Lillehammer affair, six Israeli operatives were arrested for the murder of Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan waiter who was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh.

Recent remarks by Abu Daoud, the alleged mastermind of the Munich kidnappings, deny that any of the Palestinians assassinated by Mossad had any relation to the Munich operation, this despite the fact that the list includes two of the three surviving members of the kidnap squad arrested at the airport.