Abu Daoud

 ( 1937 Births ) 

In 1970, Abu Daoud was one of the founders of Fatah. He received military training from the North Korean military. From 1971 he was leader of the Black September, a Fatah offshoot created to avenge the September 1970 expulsion of the Fedayeen Movement from Jordan and carry out international operations. The group gained international notoriety for its role in the Munich massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which a number of athletes on the Israeli team were taken hostage by Black September. Eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman were killed by the end of the multi-day stand-off. Documents uncovered in 2012 show that logistical help and support were supplied by two German neo-Nazis, Wolfgang Abramowski and Willi Pohl. The connection was made through Udo Albrecht, a neo-Nazi who set up a right-wing German group (Volksbefreiungs-Front Deutschland) and provided assistance to the Palestinians in return for training facilities in Jordan.Gunther Latsch and Klaus Wiegrefe. (18 June 2012). Munich Olympics Massacre: Files Reveal Neo-Nazis Helped Palestinian Terrorists Der Spiegel Daniel Koehler. (2017). Right-Wing Terrorism in the 21st Century: The 'National Socialist Underground' and the History of Terror from the Far Right in Germany. Routledge 2017 p. 80

After the Black September attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and Lebanon. He resumed his activities with Fatah and the PLO in close collaboration with Abu Iyad and other officials. He led armed units in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. In January 1977, Oudeh was intercepted by French police in Paris while travelling from Beirut under an assumed name,

On 1 August 1981, "Suspected Olympic massacre mastermind shot" , Montreal Gazette, 6 August 1981, p10 Oudeh was shot five times from a distance of around two meters (6') in the coffee shop of the Victoria Inter-Continental Hotel in Warsaw, but he survived the attack, chasing his would-be assassin down to the front entrance of the hotel before collapsing. Oudeh claimed the attempted assassination was carried out by a Palestinian double agent recruited by the Mossad, and claimed the would-be assassin was executed by the PLO ten years later.

After the 1993 Oslo Accords, he moved to Ramallah in the West Bank. Following a trip to Jordan and the publication of his memoirs, Oudeh was banned from returning to Ramallah. He settled with his family in Syria, the only country that would take him. He lived on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority and gave interviews to Aljazeera and other Arab and international media outlets about his life, the Munich events, and Palestinian politics. Oudeh was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996, so he could attend a PLO meeting in the Gaza Strip to rescind an article in the PLO charter calling for Israel's eradication.

In 2006, Abu Daoud gave several personal interviews after the release of the Steven Spielberg film Munich revived discussions of the massacre. Abu Daoud remained unrepentant regarding his role in the Munich attacks, stating on Germany's Spiegel TV, "I regret nothing. You can only dream that I would apologise." In an Associated Press interview, he justified the operation by claiming it was a strategic success, declaring: "Before Munich, we were simply terrorists. After Munich, at least people started asking who are these terrorists? What do they want? Before Munich, nobody had the slightest idea about Palestine."

In 1999, the Palestinian Prize for Culture was granted to Abu Daoud for his book Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich, in which he describes how he planned and executed the Munich operation. As part of the prize, Abu Daoud was awarded 10,000 French francs.