Luttif Afif

Luttif Afif (1937?  – 6 September 1972), alias Issa (Jesus in Arabic), was the commander of the group of Palestinian fedayeen,[1] who led the invasion into the Munich Olympic Village on 5 September 1972 and took as hostage nine members of Israel's Olympic team after killing two members who resisted. He was the chief negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians, who were members of the Black September offshoot of Yassir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. The various pictures of Afif, wearing a white beach hat and a linen safari suit and his face covered with charcoal or shoe polish are some of the iconic images of the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Early life

Luttif Afif's mother was Jewish, while his father was a wealthy Christian Arab businessman from Nazareth.[2][3] In 1958 he started to study engineering in Germany, and learned the language.[3]

The Munich massacre

According to several sources, including Serge Groussard and Simon Reeve, Afif claimed that his own personal reason for taking the Israelis hostage was to get two of his brothers out of Israeli prisons (another brother was said to be in Black September). Issa was described by Manfred Schreiber, chief of the Munich police and one of the German negotiators, as "very cool and determined, clearly fanatical in his convictions."

For Walther Tröger, then-Mayor of the Olympic Village, he gave the impression of being an "intelligent and reasonable man," unlike his comrades, who in the eyes of the Olympic official were "gallow birds" (German: Galgenvögel). He said that of course he didn't like Issa because of what he was doing, but he could have liked him if he had met him elsewhere.

Afif spent most of his time in Connollystraße 31 chatting with either the German delegation or the young policewoman Anneliese Graes. She described him as "always polite and correct." When he was asked not to wave his hand grenade in front of her, he simply laughed and replied, "you have nothing to fear from me."

After tense negotiations, the hostage crisis ended after 21 hours with a bungled ambush of the hostage takers at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase outside of Munich. Afif and four of his compatriots were killed by German snipers, but not before machine-gunning all nine remaining hostages and blowing up a helicopter containing four of them with a hand grenade. Afif is reported in most accounts of the event (and depicted in the films Munich and 21 Hours at Munich) as the guerrilla who threw the hand grenade into the eastern helicopter. Autopsy reports show that the hostages in this helicopter were shot as well; it stands to reason that Afif performed both actions. It has been speculated that one of the other fedayeen, Adnan Al-Gashey, machine-gunned the remaining hostages in the western helicopter seconds after.

The bodies of Afif and his four compatriots were turned over to Libya, where they received a hero's funeral and were buried with full military honors.

In literature and cinema

In Serge Groussard's The Blood of Israel, Issa was misidentified as Mohammed Safady, one of the Munich gunmen who actually survived the Fürstenfeldbruck gunfight. Another identity was suggested for Issa in Aaron Klein's Striking Back; he identifies the terrorist leader as Mohammed Massalha, who turned out to be his own father.

Issa has been portrayed by Franco Nero in the 1976 TV movie 21 Hours at Munich, and by French actor Karim Saleh in Steven Spielberg's film Munich (2005).

See also

Sources

References

  1. ↑ David Clay Large. Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games: p196.
  2. ↑ David Clay Large (2012). Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games. Rowman & Littlefield.
  3. 1 2 http://spectator.org/articles/47620/indiana-spielberg-and-his-jewish-problem

Further reading


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