According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the three surviving Olympic attackers from 1972 was unmolested in Berlin 13 years after the bloody hostage-taking in Munich. The police in Bavaria were informed by an informant from the Federal Criminal Police Office about the whereabouts of the Palestinian terrorist, who commuted almost daily between the western and eastern parts of the city, the newspaper writes (Saturday), citing files that have since been published in the Munich State Archives are stored and accessible to a limited extent. However, the reliability of the BKA informant at the time had not been clarified. The information may then have been lost in Bavaria, but it is unclear whether it was ever followed up.
On September 5, 1972, during the Olympic Games in Munich, a Palestinian terrorist commando attacked the Israeli team in the Olympic Village and took eleven hostages. All eleven hostages, a German police officer and five of the eight terrorists died in shootings in the village and later at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base. Three of the assassins survived and were imprisoned, but were later released with the help of a hijacking of a plane.
The hostage-taking in Munich is considered one of the most serious acts of terrorism in the history of the Federal Republic. The police and authorities later admitted serious mistakes and omissions during the unsuccessful liberation operation. After decades of negotiations, the survivors of the Israeli victims agreed with the German government on compensation payments totaling 28 million euros just a few days ago.
The report about a terrorist who may be living freely in Berlin with the knowledge of German authorities fuels a theory that had previously been put forward primarily by the Israeli survivors: the German government is said to have made a deal with the Palestinians to prevent further attacks on German soil . In return, the Palestinians should be freed.
“The question arises as to whether the police became active at all or refrained from a possible arrest in order not to risk attacks by militant Palestinians in the Federal Republic,” the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” quotes the Munich historian Dominik Aufleger, who also has access to the had documentation. The theory of the bereaved even goes so far that the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane “Kiel” – at the time the subject of the free pressing – was only fictitious. How much of the theory is true is unclear.
A spokesman for the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior said on Saturday that the processing of the files was the responsibility of a commission of historians, the establishment of which had been agreed between the federal government and the Israeli survivors in the course of the compensation negotiations.
