Excerpted from One Day in September: The Story of the
1972 Munich Olympics Massacre by Simon Reeve. Copyright
© 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights
reserved.
Chapter One
The Takeover
It was 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 5 September 1972,
when a small group of shadowy figures arrived on the
outskirts of the Olympic Village in Munich and made
their way silently to the six-foot perimeter fence
supposed to offer protection to the thousands of
athletes sleeping within.
Creeping through the darkness carrying heavy sports
bags, the group made for a length of the fence near
Gate 25A, which was locked at midnight but left
unguarded. The 35-year-old leader of the small troop,
Luttif Issa, a.k.a. ‘Issa’, had carefully
chosen the point at which his men were to enter the
village. On previous nights he had seen athletes
climbing the fence near Gate 25A while returning drunk
from late-night parties. Security was lax and none of
the athletes had been stopped. So Issa dressed his
seven colleagues in tracksuits, reasoning that if
guards saw them they would assume they were just
sportsmen returning to their quarters.
Jamal Al-Gashey, at 18 one of the younger members of
the group, remembers the tension building as they
approached the fence. There they came across a few
drunk American athletes returning to their beds by the
same route.
‘They had been forced to leave the village in
secret for their night out,’ Al-Gashey
remembered. ‘We could see they were Americans ...
and they were going to go over the [fence] as
well.’ Issa quickly decided the foreign athletes
could give his group cover if they helped each other
over the fence. ‘We got chatting,’ said
Al-Gashey, ‘and then we helped each other
over.’ Al-Gashey lifted one of the US team up
onto the fence, which was topped not by barbed wire but
small round cones, and then the American turned and
helped to pull Al-Gashey up and over.
Several officials, including six German postmen on
their way to the temporary post office in the Village
Plaza, saw between eight and 12 people in two groups
with sports bags climbing the fence at around 4.10 a.m.
As Issa had assumed, none of these passers-by
challenged them because they thought the fence-climbers
were just athletes returning home.
‘We walked for a while with the American
athletes,’ Al-Gashey recounted, ‘then said
goodbye.’ The group split up and stole through
the sleeping Village to a drab three-storey block on
Connollystrasse, one of three broad pedestrianized
streets, adorned with shrubbery and fountains, snaking
from east to west through the Village. Even if the
unarmed Olympic guards or the Munich police had been
alerted it would probably have been too late.
The eight men were terrorists from Black September, an
extremist faction within the Palestinian Liberation
Organization. The fedayeen (‘fighters for the
faith’) were carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles
and grenades, hidden under clothing in the sports bags,
and they were fully prepared to fight their way to
their target: 31 Connollystrasse, the building in the
heart of the Olympic Village that housed the Israeli
delegation to the Olympic Games. New entrants were
about to make their mark on the XXth Olympiad.