Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD • 459MUNICH MASSACRE. On 5 September 1972, eight Black Septemberterrorists attacked the Israeli Olympic team in the MunichOlympic Village, killing two Israeli athletes outright and taking theremaining three Israeli athletes and six coaches hostage. The eightterrorists demanded the release of 234 prisoners in Israel, includingKozo Okamoto, the surviving Japanese Red Army member ofthe terrorist team that had struck Lod airport in May 1972. After 17hours of negotiations between the terrorists and the West Germangovernment, which Israel had informed of its refusal of the terrorists’demands, the terrorists and their hostages were transferred in twohelicopters to Fürstenfeldbruck airport outside Munich where, theywere told, a Boeing 727 would take them to Cairo. Instead, Bavarianpolice sharpshooters botched an attempt to kill the terrorists as theyleft the two helicopters. In the melee that ensued at about midnighton 6 September 1972, the terrorists shot their hostages dead and setthe two helicopters on fire. Five of the terrorists died as well, andtheir remaining injured were captured and imprisoned. These, however,were later released in exchange for the release of a Lufthansapassenger plane seized by other Black September operatives on 29October 1972.The incompetence of the Bavarian police operation led West Germanyto develop an elite antiterrorist squad, the Grenzschutz gruppe-9 (GSG-9), while the Israelis established the Wrath of God covertoperations group that tracked down and killed those responsible forthe operation.MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD. The Ikhwan al Muslimin is a nonstateIslamic fundamentalist group that seeks to replace existing seculargovernments in the Muslim world with a caliphate, that is, a unitarytheocratic Pan-Islamic government under which both religious andpolitical affairs would be governed by the Shari’ah, the traditionalcanon of Islamic laws. The name is applied to several territorial organizations,for example, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the SyrianMuslim Brotherhood, and so on, that are formally independent of oneanother though all are historically derived from the original Ikhwanfounded in Egypt by Hassan al Banna (1906–1949) in 1928. In landswhose governments are either sympathetic or at least not hostile to theIkhwan, the local organization tends to define its aims and methods interms of islah, reformism, whereas in countries whose governments