Fuad Shemali

Who was Fuad Shemali?

Fuad Shemali, alternatively Fouad El Chemali was a major figure in Black September, which was active in the early 1970s, and was the mastermind of some of its early operations, including the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich and the 1972 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum.

He was born in 1936 to a Lebanese Christian-Maronite family. He studied law at the University of St. Joseph in Beirut. He adhered to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1951 and joined Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1960s and later on the Black September movement named after the similarly name Black September events in Jordan. He died of cancer in Geneva in August 1972.