Palestinian guerrilla Abu Daoud is set to acknowledge openly for the first time that the PLO was behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, his publishers said Wednesday.
The disclosure is made in Daoud's memoirs, to be published in April, a spokesman for Editions Anne Carriere told Reuters.Daoud is finishing the autobiography, which will be published in French though the guerrilla does not speak the language, with the help of French journalist Gilles du Jonchay, a specialist on Middle East violence who has made a film documentary about the international guerrilla Carlos.
The title of the book will be "L'An prochain en Palestine - 50 ans de combat pour un reve" (Next year in Palestine - a 50-year struggle for a dream), the spokesman said. Negotiations are under way to sell the rights to the book in other languages, the spokesman said.
Daoud, a member of the Palestine National Council, would confirm in his memoirs that Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization carried out the Munich operation in which 11 Israeli athletes died, the spokesman said.
The PLO at the time denied any connection to the action for which the-then unknown Black September Movement claimed responsibility.
Another PLO leader, Abu Iyad, who has since been assassinated by a rival group, has written that Black September was only a cover name for the Fatah special operations units.
"Abu Daoud says that we all need to recognize now what was done in the past and it is in that spirit that his book is being written," the spokesman said.
"But Munich is only part of the book. Remember, Abu Daoud was born in Jerusalem and personally witnessed such events as the blowing up in 1947 of the King David Hotel," the spokesman said.
The hotel, which at the time served as the British military headquarters, was blown up by the Irgun Jewish underground group.
Abu Daoud, whose real name is Muhammed Daoud Audeh, was arrested in France in 1977 and expelled to Algeria, sparking a crisis in Franco-Israeli relations.
He was shot and wounded by an unknown gunman in a Warsaw hotel in 1981.
Daoud, who now lives in Jordan, may come to Paris in February to promote his autobiography before it goes to press, the publisher said.