The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (6 page)

On February 15, 1997, Lebanon arrested six members of the JRA in the Bekaa Valley and West Beirut. (Later reports said eight people, five of them JRA members, were arrested.) They were identified as Kazuo Tohira, 44; Hisashi Matsuda, 48; Mariko Yamamoto, 56, alias Maria; Masao Adachi, 57, alias The Editor, because of his work in pornographic films; Haruo Wako; and Okamoto, 49. Also arrested was acupuncturist Omaya Abboud, 35. Japan said it would send a team to identify the captives and seek their extradition if appropriate. In March 1997, Lebanese state prosecutor Adnan Addoum announced that Lebanon would not extradite the suspects as Japan had requested but would instead try them for forgery and entering the country illegally. The two countries lack an extradition treaty. Japan had recently been involved in the apprehensions of JRA members in Nepal, Peru, and Romania.

National Public Radio reported that other JRA detainees were wanted for bank robbery, hijacking, and a shoot-out.

Okamoto, Yamamoto, and Tohira had frequented a quiet acupuncture clinic in Taanayel. Adachi was often seen being chauffeured in a silver Mercedes. He claimed to be a Malaysian engineer with Solidere, the company rebuilding Beirut's central business district. Yamamoto lived in a two-bedroom apartment in West Beirut's New Street.

On April 3, 1997, a Beirut investigative judge indicted Tohira, Wako, Yamamoto, Adachi, and Okamoto for passport forgery, illegal entry into
Lebanon, and official stamps forgery, which carried 10-year prison sentences. A three-judge panel needed to approve the indictment before the suspects could appear in court. The trial opened on June 9, 1997; 136 lawyers offered to take their cases pro bono. Acupuncturist Umayya Abboud went on trial simultaneously on charges of illegally practicing medicine. On July 31, 1997, a Lebanese court sentenced five JRA terrorists to three years in jail. The sentences came a day after the United States ended a decadelong ban on Americans visiting Lebanon after Beirut pledged to do more to combat terrorism. On March 1, 2000, Lebanon refused Japan's request for Okamoto's extradition. He was granted asylum on health grounds.

Overview:
Before 9/11, arguably the most well-known terrorist attack was the Black September Organization's (BSO's) storming of the Olympic Village in 1972 and taking the Israeli team hostage. The group's name came from the Jordanian government's crackdown on Palestinian extremists in September 1970, following the Dawson's Field multiple hijackings. By attacking an event covered by thousands of journalists and watched worldwide by hundreds of millions of people, the Black September operation dominated world headlines. In the United States, the term “Palestinian” soon became synonymous with “terrorist,” all evidence to the contrary. The Black September attack further cemented the effectiveness of barricade-and-hostage operations in the eyes of fellow terrorist groups and presented governments with a wrenching policy decision as to whether to bargain with terrorist hostage-takers. In what later became the stuff of movies and novels, Mossad conducted a years-long assassination campaign against terrorists involved in the attack.

Incident:
On September 5, 1972, eight members of the BSO broke into the Israeli quarter at the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, killing two Israeli athletes and taking nine others hostage. They demanded the release of 236 guerillas in Israeli jails, including Japanese Red Army ( JRA) terrorist Kozo Okamoto, the release of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in West Germany, and safe passage to a foreign country. After a shoot-out with police, the hostages were killed, as were five of the terrorists and a West German policeman. The three surviving terrorists, two of whom were wounded, were released after the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet on October 29, 1972.

The group cut through the village's fence and made its way to the dormitory housing the Hong Kong, Uruguayan, and Israeli teams. At 5:30
A.M
., the group burst into the Israelis' quarters. Six of the team reached safety. The nine Israelis who were trapped fought their attackers with knives but
were soon overcome. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were forced to hobble to a central location. Soon after, the terrorists threw a note out of a window with their demands—the release of 236 prisoners within 4 hours and safe passage out of Germany. They threatened to kill two of their hostages every half hour after the 9:00
A.M
. deadline. The Germans offered an amount of money to be specified by the terrorists, and German interior minister Hans Dietrich Genscher offered himself and his colleagues as substitute hostages. These suggestions were turned down. The initial negotiations were established between a police officer, Amalise Graes, and the terrorists' leader, Mohammed Masalhah, alias Esa, who trained a machine gun on Graes and kept a hand grenade ready. He told her that his father was Jewish, his mother Jordanian, and his brothers were in Israeli jails.

The police were unsuccessful in plans to trick the terrorists. Manfred Schreiber, the Munich police chief, and Ahmed Touni, the head of the Egyptian Olympics team, repeated their monetary offers to the terrorists, who replied, “Money means nothing to us; our lives mean nothing to us.” The terrorists again extended their deadline but threatened to shoot two hostages in front of the building. At 12:30
P.M.
, a third deadline was postponed when Genscher and Bruno Merck, the interior minister of Bavaria, told the terrorists that they were still talking to the Israeli government. The deadline was then extended to 2:30 p.m., and Tunisian ambassador Mahmoud Mestiri later got an extension to 5:00
P.M
. At 4:30
P.M
., while the police squad assembled to storm the building, the terrorists demanded to be flown to Cairo, Egypt, with their hostages. They also called for a swap of hostages for the prisoners in Israel when the plane touched down.

The West Germans traced calls made by the terrorists to Beirut and Tunisia. The Beirut number belonged to a Palestinian refugee organization. Mestiri said that the Tunis number belonged to an unnamed “honorable personage.” The calls were unanswered. After these calls, at around 3:30
P.M
., Mestiri got the deadline extended.

Chancellor Willy Brandt had phoned the Israeli government, who urged that the demands of the terrorists not be granted, although the Israelis were willing to give the group safe passage if their athletes were released. Brandt also attempted to reach Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, but could only get Prime Minister Aziz Sidki, to whom he suggested that the terrorists be allowed to fly to Cairo. Sidki claimed that this was not Egypt's affair and that he could do nothing about it. Egypt later claimed that Brandt misunderstood Sidki, who meant Egypt was powerless to influence the terrorists, as were the West Germans. One last deadline delay was achieved between 6:30
P.M
. and 9:00
P.M
. During this time, the Libyan ambassador in Munich offered to mediate, but was turned down. He had suggested that he attempt to reduce the demands from the release of 236 to 13 imprisoned guerrillas. At 9:00
P.M
., the terrorists agreed to leave
the building with their hostages. At 10:10
P.M
., using underground corridors, the terrorists boarded a bus with their hostages and were taken to their helicopters, which flew them to Fürstenfeldbruck Military Airport, instead of Riem, Munich's main civil airport. A Lufthansa B-707 was waiting when the helicopters landed at 10:35
P.M
. Although Esa had agreed not to hold the four pilots hostage, the Black Septembrists now kept their guns trained on them. Two of the terrorists traversed the 165 yards from their helicopter to the plane. Police had initially been on board the plane disguised as the plane's crew, but this plan was vetoed at the last minute. The two terrorists walked back to the helicopter suspecting a trick by the authorities and were fired upon by five police snipers. Two terrorists standing beside the helicopters and one of the men walking across the tarmac were immediately killed. However, Esa dove for cover. The other terrorists fired on the hostages and control tower, killing a policeman and damaging the tower's radio. At 10:50
P.M
., the police called upon the terrorists in English, German, and Arabic to surrender but were fired on. The terrorists were armed with automatic machine guns; the Germans had only single-shot rifles. At 12:04
A.M
., a terrorist jumped from a helicopter and threw a grenade into its cabin. Another terrorist emerged from where he had been hiding. Both were immediately shot by the police snipers, but the grenade had already gone off, killing the nine hostages. Armored cars moved in and captured the surviving trio near the undamaged helicopter. One of the volunteer helicopter pilots was badly wounded in the lung. One of the Israelis died of smoke inhalation.

Four days later, the dead terrorists were flown to Libya, where they were mourned at Tripoli's main mosque. Official radio called them martyrs and heroes.

It was rumored that Libya's Col. Mu'ammar Qadhafi paid Black September $5 million for the operation.

In February 1973, Jordanian police arrested and questioned Palestinian Abu Daoud, who told his Jordanian interrogators that in August 1972 he had traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, to buy arms for Al Fatah, carrying a forged Iraqi passport for Saad ad-Din Wali. Abu Iyad and Fakhri al Umari arrived from Geneva and informed him of the Olympics plan. Daoud was ordered to give Umari his passport because it contained a valid German visa. Daoud claims that he did so after returning from Libya and that he took no other part in the attack. Many observers disagree with this claim and believe that Daoud was a major organizer of the attack.

Daoud's testimony should be compared to the account given by reporter David Tinnin of the activities of Ali Hassan Salameh. According to Tinnin, Salameh assigned Umari, chief of Black September assassins, to the case. Umari collected the weapons, possibly from an Arab diplomatic facility in West Germany, hid them in airline flight bags, and checked them in the luggage room of Munich's train station. When he tried to case the Olympics Village, he was sent away by guards. Mohammed Masalhah, a Libyan architect, was then given the assignment and was later chosen to lead the
terrorists. Two other Black September members were told to get Olympic Village jobs. The Syrian embassy vouched for them on their employment questionnaires. The other five terrorists underwent training in a refugee camp near Deraa, Syria, and then left on a circuitous route to Munich. The terrorists were ultimately to take the hostages to Tunis, which accounted for the phone calls. But according to Tinnin, the Tunisian contact apparently panicked and backed out.

On October 29, 1972, Black September hijacked Lufthansa flight 615 flying from Damascus to Frankfurt and successfully obtained the release of the three remaining terrorists—Abdullah Samir, Abdel Kadir el Dnawy, and Ibrahim Badran—picked them up at Zagreb, Yugoslavia, airport and flew on to Libya, where they disappeared.

The Israelis retaliated for the attack by raiding refugee camps in Lebanon on February 21, 1973, killing 31. They later shot down a Libyan airliner that had overflown Israeli air space, killing all 107 aboard. Israeli officials blamed Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon for being behind the Olympics attack. The Israelis established assassination squads (Mivtzan Elohim, The Wrath of God), which killed more than a dozen Black September members in the coming year. Salameh died on January 22, 1979, when a car bomb exploded near his entourage in Beirut.

On August 1, 1981, Daoud was hit by five bullets fired in the evening in the Opera coffeehouse of Warsaw's Victoria International Hotel. On May 3, 1999, he was turned away at Paris's Orly Airport when he tried to enter France to promote his new autobiography. He was now a member of the Palestine National Council and a Ramallah attorney. He acknowledged in the book his role in the Munich attack. On June 13, 1999, Israel banned him from entering the West Bank. The German government had issued a warrant for his arrest the previous week. He reportedly died of kidney failure at age 73 on July 3, 2010 in Damascus, Syria.

In early November 1995, relatives of 11 Israeli athletes and officials killed in the attack filed a $26 million lawsuit against the city of Munich, the state of Bavaria, and the Federal Republic of Germany. In rejecting the claim, a Munich court ruled that the statute of limitations had expired in 1977. The families' attorney said that he planned to appeal, because it was impossible to make a case earlier as police files regarding the incident were classified until 1992. Relatives of the Israelis were paid $1 million in a check issued in 1974 by the Red Cross. Families of the Israeli Olympics athletes murdered by Black September terrorists accepted a $2.98 million compensation package on September 6, 2002.

Overview:
Attacks by various Palestinian terrorist groups against Israeli civilians became commonplace after the formation of Fatah and various
Palestinian Marxist groups. They were later succeeded in the 1990s and 2000s by Hizballah and Hamas, which specialized in suicide bombings. Groups such as the PFLP and its splinters, including the PFLP-Special Operations and PFLP-GC, and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), while engaging in high-risk operations, usually took hostages with the intention of trading them for imprisoned colleagues and political concessions. They generally were rebuffed, but their operational aim was to kill a few, take hostage a few, and get out alive to fight again. The Ma'alot operation ratcheted up the terror quotient beyond the simple bombings and shootings, putting children at risk by attacking a school—an operation that was mimicked three decades later by Chechen terrorists in Russia. Publicity around the world regarding the attack focused global attention on the Palestinian issue, giving the terrorists exactly what they sought.