Families of Israeli Munich
victims seek justice

Thirty years after 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics, their widows and team mates are still seeking justice.

"They went to Munich with dreams and they came home in coffins," said Ankie Spitzer, widowed at 26 when her husband Andre Spitzer was gunned down during a German attempt to rescue the Israelis taken hostage by the Palestinian Black September group.

Hours after learning of her husband's death, Spitzer returned to the Israeli team's living quarters at the Olympic Village where they had been taken hostage by the Palestinians who infiltrated before daybreak on September 5.

Two members of the Israeli team -- wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yosef Romano -- were shot dead by the Palestinians at the village.

The others died in a hail of bullets during a bungled rescue attempt by Bavarian police at the air force base from where they were to be taken to Egypt along with the gunmen.

"There was blood running down the stairs," Spitzer recalled of her visit to the apartment where her husband and his team mates were held for 20 hours while the gunmen pressed demands for Israel to free 234 Palestinian prisoners and for the release of two German radicals held in a Frankfurt jail.

"Standing in the room and looking at the huge holes in the wall where they shot (Yosef Romano)... I said to myself if this is how my husband spent his last hours, somebody is going to pay the price and the price is not revenge but justice," she said.

Her vow was echoed by the other widows, family members and team mates of the dead Israelis.

They believe the lives of the surviving nine Israeli athletes were endangered unnecessarily by German and Olympic officials keen to move them out of the Olympic village so that the Games would continue unhampered by the hostage crisis.

SECRET REPORTS

For 20 years, the relatives were in the dark about the details of the rescue attempt at the nearby Furstenfeldbruck air base in an operation so bungled that if it had not ended in tragedy it would have been a comedy of errors.

The Germans refused an Israeli request to send its own crack commando team with experience in hostage stand-offs to carry out the rescue effort.

Instead, they deployed a group of untrained policemen to free the nine Israelis who were being held, bound and blindfolded, on two German military helicopters.

"They were incapable of rescuing the nine Israelis who were still alive on the helicopters. They simply did not have the resources," Spitzer said.

In 1992, after appealing for information on a German television show, she received 80 documents from an anonymous German official who had access to the archives which Spitzer said the German government had for two decades denied existed.

Using those papers, she said she embarrassed German authorities into allowing her to copy thousands of government documents on the Munich attack and was astonished at how lax the rescue operation had been.

"There was a whole room full of 4,000 files and dozens of forensic pictures," Spitzer said. "For 20 years they had lied to us that they did not have the information."

The surviving nine Israelis were killed during a fierce fire fight between the outnumbered German police and the Palestinian gunmen on the airport tarmac. A policeman and five gunmen were also killed and the other three Palestinians were captured.

According to the inquiry, the police snipers were never told that the Palestinian gunmen numbered eight and not five as they originally thought. They never knew they were seriously outgunned.

"They did not have the right weapons. They did not have walkie-talkies. They did not have infra-red night vision equipment. They did not see anything. The special armoured vehicles that were supposed to rescue the hostages were stuck in traffic," said Spitzer.

Her effort to convince the German courts to put the officials behind the rescue effort on trial hit a brick wall when the courts ruled the statute of limitations elapsed in 1975, 17 years before Spitzer obtained the documents that she said proved the police were criminally negligent.

OLYMPIC RECOGNITION

She and the other relatives are still fighting for a public apology from Germany and the Bavarian police force.

"The real struggle is for somebody to say 'We are responsible. We made a mistake and want to be forgiven'. Not from me but from those who were murdered," said Ilana Romano, the 56-year-old widow of weightlifter Yosef Romano.

The families believe the hostages were moved to the airfield and a hastily organised rescue attempted because the crisis was holding up the Olympics, a showcase for a rehabilitated Germany which had last hosted the Games in 1936 when Adolf Hitler was in power.

"The moment they took them out of the Olympic village so the Games could go on and they were not in the focus (of the media) anymore, I knew that was the end of them," Spitzer said.

She points to comments by then-Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber as proof that the German officials had no plan to rescue the hostages alive.

"We were 99 per cent sure that we wouldn't be able to achieve our objective. We felt like doctors trying to bring the dead back alive," Schreiber said afterwards, according to quotes published in the latest edition of Time magazine.

In October 1972, a group of Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa jet and demanded that the German government free the three captured Palestinians who survived the airfield fire fight. They were released. Meanwhile, Israel dispatched assassination squads to kill the Palestinians involved in what became known as the Munich Olympic massacre. Ten PLO officials whom Israel said were involved were assassinated.

The families of the 11 killed still want Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Liberation Organisation chief and Palestinian Authority president, to stand trial for what they believe was his involvement in ordering the Munich operation.

"I thought it was a travesty of common sense to see this person (Arafat) taking on the role of a statesman. They say that people change their ways but they should first pay for their terrorism before they can say they started a new chapter in their lives," Spitzer said.

One of the organisers of the Munich attack, Mohammed Daoud Awda, has said that Arafat's deputy, Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad, masterminded the operation.

A senior PLO official, who declined to be named, told Reuters recently that Arafat had been opposed to it.

The Israeli relatives and surviving team mates have for 30 years struggled in vain against the International Olympic Committee's refusal to honour the Israeli sportsmen killed at Munich in an official ceremony at an Olympic Games.

"Since Munich, we have asked for a minute of silence, or even 30 seconds of silence at the opening ceremony. We said you don't have to mention they were Israelis or Jewish, just say that 11 members of the Olympic family were murdered and they should be remembered," Spitzer said.

"(But) they refused. They told us that all the Arab states would boycott the Olympics if they did such a thing."

Three decades after Munich, the children of the Israeli dead are adults and their widows in their 50s and 60s. But they say their battle for Olympic recognition, an open inquiry in Germany and full access to information will continue.

"It's been 30 years of fighting for justice, for information on what happened at Munich and also recognition in the framework of the Olympic Games," Spitzer said.

"We are not going to rest and if we are too old then our children will do it and their children will do it because we owe it to them."