Luttif Afif

Who was Luttif Afif?

Luttif Afif, alias Issa, was the commander of the group of Palestinian fedayeen who invaded the Munich Olympic Village on 5 September 1972 and took as hostage nine members of Israel's Olympic team after killing two who resisted. He was the chief negotiator for 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.

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. Afif told the German negotiators that he had been born in Nazareth, to a wealthy Christian Arab businessman father and a Jewish mother. 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". He said that of course he didn't like Issa because of what he was doing, but he could've liked him if he had met him elsewhere.