TerrorismPLO terrorists tortured captured Israeli athletes in 1972

Forty-three years ago, on 5 September 1972, Palestinian terrorists affiliated with the PLO broke into a dormitory building in the athletic village in Munich, where the 1972 Olympic Games were being held, and captured eleven Israeli athletes.

They killed two of them, and negotiated with the German government for the release of the other nine. The German authorities agreed to let the terrorists take the nine athletes with them out of the country, with an exchange for terrorists being held in German jails to be conducted later.

The German plan was not to let the terrorists and their hostages leave – but to have police snipers kill the terrorists at the Munich airport and free the hostages.

The German police’s operational plan, however, was amateurish. There were too few snipers to kill the terrorists in the first salvo, and the tarmac was not lighted, making it impossible for the policeman clearly to distinguish the captors from their hostages. As the terrorists exited the helicopter which took them from the athletic village to the airport, and encountered the weak and sporadic police fire aimed at them, they turned and threw hand grenades into the helicopter, where the hostages were sitting tied and blindfolded, and killed them. All the terrorists, except one, were also killed.

Twenty years later, in 1992, information emerged that the Israeli hostages were tortured by the Palestinian captors.

The New York Times reports that the information will be made public the coming film “Munich 1972 & Beyond,” a documentary which details the fight by families of the victims to gain public and official acknowledgment for their loved ones. The film is expected to be released early next year.

One of the more disturbing details to be revealed in the movie is that the Israeli Olympic team members were not only severely beaten, suffering broken bones, but that one of the athletes was castrated.

Yossef Romano, a wrestler, was one of the two athletes killed in the athletic village, and the one whose genitals were cut off by the PLO terrorists. He was shot when, early in the attack, he tried to overpower the terrorists, and then left to bleed to death on the floor in front of the other hostages and castrated.

In an interview which appears in the movie, Ms. Spitzer, the widow of Andre Spitzer, a fencing coach who was also killed in the dormitory, says that it is not clear whether the mutilation of Romano occurred before or after he died, though Ms. Romano, his widow, said she believed it happened afterward.

Agents of Israel’s Mossad, on orders of Prime Ministers Golda Meir, tracked and killed all the PLO operatives who were behind the attack on the Israeli athletes, among them the attack’s mastermind, Ali Hassan Salameh, who was killed in Beirut on 22 January 1979.

The last Munich-related PLO operatives to be killed in the Mossad’s Operation Wrath of God were Abu Al Hassan Qasim and Hamdi Adwan, whose car exploded in Limassol, Cyprus, on 14 February 1988.