It’s said that on September 5, 1972, eight members of the Black September secret organization entered the Olympic Village in Munich. They arrived at the Olympic Village with AK-47s and took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches as hostages and killed two immediately.
New Delhi:
In 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually killed when a group of Black September terrorists attacked them and seized them to demand the release of several of their comrades.
Regarding this, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, in a covert capacity, authorized the Mossad, which is the Israel Institute for intelligence and special ‘operations’ to hunt down the perpetrators of the massacre.
For the next 7 years, the blow was a secret operation that came to be known as the ‘Operation Wrath of God’ and was responsible for the elimination of more than a dozen of the suspected perpetrators across Europe and the Middle East.
This covert action by a highly trained squad called ‘the kidon’, meaning bayonet in Hebrew, has been depicted in many books and documentaries and was the basis of Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Munich.’.
The Munich Massacre
In this regard, on the 5th of July 1972, eight members of the Black September assassins gained access into the Olympic Village in Munich. They masking themselves with explosive belts and equipped with AK-47s, took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches as hostages, later killing two of them.
They specified that in exchange for the release of their hostages, 234 prisoners held in Israeli prisons should be set free. Hostilities continued for hours with the German authorities trying to negotiate with the hijackers.
The terrorists proceeded to an airstrip where they were informed that two Bell UH-1 military choppers would be utilized to transfer them to Cairo. Three of the terrorists shot all the remaining hostages, including a German policeman, and the other five were killed during a failed German police raid.y
