Many people know that the Winter Olympics are being held in this tranquil Norwegian town. However, they might not know that 20 years ago, Lillehammer was the scene of a bungled assassination by Israel's secret service, Mossad.
On July 21, 1973, a Mossad hit squad gunned down a man they blamed for the Palestinian terrorist group Black September's massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.They were wrong.
The man they shot 13 times was an innocent Moroccan waiter, trying to build a new life in the future Olympic city of Lillehammer.
"We realized quickly that there must have been a misunderstanding, and that the wrong person had been killed," said Tore Hasle, an investigator on duty that day with the Lillehammer Police Department.
The slaying strained usually warm relations between Norway and Israel and drew world attention.
"It was the first time people with apparent connections to Mossad had been arrested abroad and brought before the court," said Hasle, now chief administrative officer for the Lil-le-ham-mer police.
Last year, Gen. Aharon Yariv, a former leader of Israeli military intelligence, said told Israeli television that Mossad was behind the Lillehammer murder as part of the hunt for Black September. It was the first public Israeli admission in the case.
After the Munich massacre, Mossad formed "Committee X," to track down and kill those behind the attack, according to Nils-Inge Kruhaug, a journalist at the Norwegian news agency NTB. Twelve people are believed to have been killed in the hunt.
The trail led Mossad to Norway, a country that would later secretly broker the peace agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization signed in Washington last year.
Mossad believed it had located Ali Hassan Salameh, code named "The Red Prince," who was on their death list, Kruhaug said.
A team of 11 men and four women from several countries was assembled in Norway, in safe houses and hotels under false names, he said.
Mossad trailed Algerian Kemal Benamane, a suspected contact for Salameh, to Lillehammer, then a virtually crime-free town of fewer than 20,000 people.
A chance encounter between Benamane, a French tourist and the 30-year-old Moroccan waiter Achmed Bouchiki was observed by Mossad. The three French-speaking men only wanted to chat over coffee at a sidewalk cafe, according to Kruhaug. The encounter left the waiter marked for death.
A few hours after the final death order came, two gunmen leaped out of a rented car and fired 14 shots from silenced .22-caliber pistols, hitting their victim 13 times, according to Kruhaug.
But the man they left dead had nothing to do with the Munich attack.
Bouchiki and his wife, Torill, who was seven months pregnant, had been to the movies, and took the bus home. It was about 10:30 p.m., and still light because of Norway's long summer days.
Torill, a Lillehammer native, was less than a yard from her husband but was not wounded.
The killing stunned tranquil Lillehammer.
"At that time, it was almost a sensation if there was a break-in," said Lillehammer police veteran Hasle. "There was very little serious crime, so when something like this happened, it was a completely new and unknown situation for the local police."
However, the accuracy, speed and silence of the attack gave the killers away as professionals.
"We could very quickly put behind us the thought that this was a normal murder, or a robbery, and that it must have had an international dimension," Hasle said.
The Mossad agents made it easy for the police.
"There were a lot of people in this small town who noticed these strangers and wondered why they driving around in new rental cars with walkie-talkies, and with a lot of money passing through their hands," Hasle said.
"Lillehammer wasn't very international then, so hotel clerks would remember people with foreign passports. And they (Mossad) seemed to think they were more anonymous than they were."
The small town cops - there were 16 in the whole department - had another edge.
"We knew every road that they could take out of Lillehammer," Hasle said.
A policeman spotted a suspicious car headed out of Lil-le-ham-mer and noted the license number. That led to first arrests, within 12 hours of the murder.
The next day, the car was seen at Oslo's Fornebu airport, leading to the arrest of Swedish-born Ethel Marianne Gladnikoff, and Danish-born Dan Aerbel, who slipped up and gave the police the address of their safe house in Oslo.
Police arrested South African Sylvia Rafael and Israeli Abraham Gehmer at the apartment. Two more arrests followed, but the Norwegians never caught the suspected leaders or the actual gunmen.
The six were tried as accessories to murder and for espionage in January 1974 in an Oslo courtroom guarded by heavily armed police.
Five were convicted, and sentenced to up to nine years in prison. The sixth suspect, Israeli Michael Dorf, was acquitted.
Within 18 months all five were released from prison, probably under pressure from Israel.
The case remains open, but the statute of limitations does not run out until 1998, although Norway actually gave up the manhunt in 1977, Kruhaug said.
But even after two decades, the case is still known in Norway simply as "The Lillehammer Murder."