Luttif Afif

Luttif Afif (1937 or 1945 - 6 September 1972), alias Issa (Jesus in Arabic), was the commander of the group of Palestinian fedayeen, 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.

Luttif Afif's mother was Jewish, while his father was a wealthy Christian Arab businessman from Nazareth. Afif had three other brothers, all were in Black September, two of whom were in Israeli jails. In 1958 he moved to West Germany to study engineering, learned the language and then moved to France to work. According to Reeve, he enjoyed the time spent in Europe, but joined Fatah in 1966, possibly while residing in Germany. Issa returned to the Middle East to fight several battles against Israeli soldiers. Abu Iyad, the head of Black September, wrote that both Afif and his second in command Tony had both fought in Amman in September 1970 and in the battle of Jerash and Ajlun in July 1971. In the early 1970s however, he was living in Berlin and was engaged to a young German woman.

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 his two brothers out of Israeli prisons. Afif 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" who expressed his demands in a forceful manner and at times "sounded like [one of] those people who aren't completely anchored in reality."

For Walther Tröger, then-Mayor of the Olympic Village, Afif 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). Tröger said of course he didn't like him because of what he was doing, but he could have liked him if he had met him elsewhere.

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