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By Root 1026 0

them climb the fence. They made for Connollystrasse 31, one of a series of low-rise flats where athletes and their trainers were housed. There they donned ski masks and took out weapons from the sports bags. Using a key they had purloined, the group quietly tried the lock of the door to apartment 1. This scratching sound awoke a wrestling referee called Yossef Gutfreund who, half asleep, went to the door. On seeing armed men through the crack, he used his capacious bulk to keep them outside. Gutfreund’s desperate shouts led a weightlifting trainer to smash a window and flee outside. The terrorists forced their way past Gutfreund and burst into the apartment. The wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg grabbed a fruit knife and slashed at Luttif. Another terrorist shot Weinberg in the face. Taking Weinberg with them, the terrorists went past apartment 2, which contained more Israeli athletes, and headed along the street to apartment 3 where the weightlifters and wrestlers lodged. They were captured and taken back out into the street towards apartment 1. In that moment a wrestler managed to break loose and flee into an underground car park. The wounded Weinberg smashed one of the terrorists in the face, breaking his jaw, before he was scythed down by submachine-gun fire and left dying in the street. As lights flashed on as a result of the commotion, the terrorists herded their captives back into apartment 1 and up its internal stairs. At that point, a weightlifter called Yossef Romano, who was on crutches because of a ligament injury, hurled himself at his guards. He was shot dead and left in the middle of the floor of the room where the Israeli hostages were held. At around 5 a.m. the first calls alerting the head of the Munich police and, forty-five minutes later, Golda Meir’s government began to make this a major diplomatic, as well as a human, crisis.

Hostage-taking is the simple preliminary to the more complex process of demands and negotiation. The attack had been facilitated by major security lapses. The Israelis themselves had not made enough of where their team was housed, in a building with direct access from the street, nor had they insisted on having armed security guards. Keen to dispel memories of the 1936 Berlin Games, the Bavarian authorities had decided to convert policemen into friendly stewards, equipped with walkie-talkies and a smile rather than pistols and submachine guns, to underline the ‘Peace and Joy’ theme of their Games. Access to the Olympic Village seemed incredibly easy to effect.8

The Black September team had been given two sets of written terms; the first demanded the release by 9 a.m. of two hundred Palestinian and foreign terrorist prisoners, including the two female Sabena hijackers and Okamoto; the second offered an extended period for negotiations, but demanded a plane to fly the terrorists and their captives out of Germany, preferably to Egypt or Morocco. These conditions were backed up by threats to execute their hostages by specific deadlines. In practice the first demand was otiose since the deadline had almost expired before the first senior German officials in Bonn had been notified of these events. Initial negotiations with Issa were conducted by the Munich police chief, Manfred Schreiber, first on the telephone and then face to face. During these meetings Schreiber wondered whether he could seize the grenade clasped in Issa’s hand as the two men talked across a low balcony. Since the Israeli government ruled out any hostages-for-prisoners exchange, the ball was firmly in the Germans’ court, their only option being to spin out the negotiations - postponing the looming deadlines - while they considered what to do. One delaying tactic was to introduce a senior political figure into the talks who could guarantee whatever bargains were struck, this being the lot of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the federal government interior minister. At one point he courageously offered to enter the apartment to see the Israeli captives; he was horrified by the sight of them tied to chairs, with Romano’s corpse