Lillehammer affair
The Lillehammer Affair is the name given to the events surrounding the mistaken murder of Ahmed Bouchiki by the Caesarea unit of the Israeli secret service Mossad on July 21, 1973 in Lillehammer, Norway . As part of the publicly known " Operation Zorn Gottes ", the Israeli government ordered the killing of Ali Hassan Salameh as one of those responsible in retaliation for the fatal hostage-taking in Munich in 1972 . Bouchiki was mistaken for Salameh and as a result shot in the street in front of his pregnant Norwegian wife.
Occasion: The 1972 Olympic attack
At the 1972 Summer Olympics , the Palestinian terror squad “ Black September ” took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in order to free 232 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and two members of the RAF incarcerated in Germany . During the hostage-taking, the terrorists shot two Israelis resisting. The deliberate release failed because the Israeli government refused to even negotiate an exchange. The German authorities pretended that the terrorists were ready to fly them out with the hostages and improvised a violent attempt at liberation. If this was not carried out properly, the terrorists also killed the remaining nine hostages. Three of the eight terrorists survived the police operation and were arrested. However, there was no trial because a few weeks later they were released by the hijacking of the Lufthansa aircraft "Kiel". In order to rescue the passengers and the crew, the German federal government was forced to let the terrorists go unpunished. This was generally interpreted to mean that the federal government had an interest in getting rid of the terrorists in order to prevent further blackmail attempts and aircraft hijackings.
The retaliatory operation
To atone for the victims and to give satisfaction to the bereaved, the Israeli security cabinet under Prime Minister Golda Meir decided in the autumn of 1972 to undertake a long-term retaliatory operation with the aim of deliberately killing the attackers and those behind the attack. For this purpose, the Mossad special unit " Caesarea " was formed, the first commander of which was later Prime Minister Ehud Barak . The operation was later discussed in public under the title "Wrath of God" (Wrath of God) or "Operation Bayonet" (Operation Bayonet), which was not awarded by the Mossad. As part of the operation, so-called liquidations were presumably carried out until 1992; it was only officially ended in 1994 with the Oslo Agreement .
The mistake of a bystander
As a result of a false tip, the Mossad suspected Ali Hassan Salameh , one of the leaders of Black September and chiefly responsible for the Olympic attack, in the summer of 1973 in Lillehammer, Norway. By this time the “Caesarea” unit had already carried out numerous liquidations and believed that it was on a wave of success. The bereaved relatives of the assassination victims were regularly called anonymously and asked to listen to the news, in which they then learned that another assassin or one of the people behind them had been killed.
The Mossad agents Gustav Pistauer and Jean-Luc Sevenier first recruited Dan Ærbel and prepared the attack in Norway. Divided into two groups, further agents were brought to Norway via Amsterdam and Zurich. There they formed together with agents who were already there under the head of operations Michael "Mike" Harari to the actual attack group, the so-called "hit team". In addition to Harari, the hit team included the two later gunmen Jonathan Isaac Englesberg (alias: Jonathan Ingleby) and a young woman named "Tamara" (also: Tamar or Marie), who is said to be a professional killer of the Mossad and lover of what was then Europe. The boss was Georg Manner , as well as Rolf Baehr, Gerard Lafond, Abraham Gehmer (code name: Leslie Orbaum), Victor Zipstein (code name: Zwi Steinberg), Michael Dorf, Marianne Gladnikoff, Sylvia Rafael ( code name: Patricia Lesley Roxburgh), Raoul Cousin and Nora Heffner. Allegedly the action was led by Georg Manner. Mossad boss Tzwi Zamir is also said to have been in Norway during the attack.
Bouchiki, who has been living in Norway since 1965 and has been married to a Norwegian there since 1972, was targeted by the attack team when he met Kemal Benamene, who had previously been unknown to him, in the local swimming pool on July 17, 1973 . Named was like Bouchiki Arab and was mistaken for a courier of the terrorist group Black September by the Mossad . Pleased to have the opportunity to have a conversation with a “compatriot” in Arabic, Bouchiki met Benamene in a café the next day. This meeting was watched by Mossad agents, who recorded Bouchiki and Benamene exchanging addresses.
The verification of whether the suspect really was the wanted Salameh was done extremely negligently. Only a single photo was used and any features that contradict the assumption were ignored. The salameh we were looking for was very large, whereas Bouchiki was only medium-sized. Bouchiki also lacked the typical salameh scar. He was also married to a Norwegian woman who was seven months pregnant by him, so obviously rooted in the place.
Shortly before the planned execution, two agents raised concerns because the Bouchiki they were observing appeared to speak fluent Norwegian, which contradicted the information about Salameh. Nevertheless, based on the previous photo comparison, Harari decided against terminating the operation.
It is unclear how the 1.73 meter tall Ahmed Bouchiki could be confused with the 1.92 meter tall Ali Hassan Salameh . Even superficial inquiries would have shown that Bouchiki, the man who was murdered by the Mossad, was a person well known in Lillehammer . Bouchiki worked as a waiter in a hospital and was married to the local hospital worker Torill Larsen. In 1965 he came to Norway with his Algerian father and Moroccan mother. He had taken a state hotel course and had worked as a waiter, with a few interruptions, ever since. He met Larsen in 1972 and married her the same year she was two months pregnant. To improve his future prospects, Bouchiki trained as a lifeguard, occasionally in the local swimming pool. There he met Benamene on July 19, 1973.
The Bouchiki Assassination
On July 21, 1973, Ahmed Bouchiki first went to the swimming pool for training. He and his wife then went to the movies together, watched the film Where Eagles Dare , and took the bus home. On the way from the bus stop to the apartment, the white Mazda driven by Rolf Baehr, from which Englesberg and “Tamara” got out, stopped next to them, while Gerard Lafond stayed in the car. They stepped up to Bouchiki, who could only say "No" before the first six shots hit him in the stomach. Bouchiki fell to the ground and received two headshots. The agents then shot him six more times in the back in front of his wife.
Follow-up: prosecution and compensation
In the course of the search, the Norwegian police succeeded in arresting agents Ærbel and Gladnikoff the next day when they were about to return the escape vehicle they had rented under their own name at Oslo airport. When they were interrogated, they revealed the other members, which led to four more arrests and the securing of incriminating documents, as well as the discovery of a network of conspiratorial hiding places. The head of the group, Harari, and the two killers managed to escape to Israel undetected. During the trial against the six arrested, Dorf was the only one to be acquitted, and the others were sentenced to between two and a half and five years in prison. The sentences remained below the minimum sentences customary in Norway and, moreover, had little practical significance, as all of them enjoyed generous release regulations and were released after 19 or 22 months and deported to Israel. The Norwegian extradition request for Michael Harari was rejected by the Israeli government, which as a result prevented him from being held accountable for the crime. Allegedly, after leaving the Mossad, he became a well-known mercenary who fought in Africa as well as in Central and South America.
It was not until 1996 that the Israeli government decided to pay compensation to the family of the innocent victim Bouchiki without officially admitting responsibility.
The murder of Salameh
Ali Hassan Salameh was finally killed in a Mossad car bomb attack in Lebanon in 1979 . Several uninvolved passers-by died. As far as is known, Salameh never stayed in Norway, let alone in Lillehammer.
The Lillehammer affair and the Israeli atomic bomb
The lawyer Annæus Schjødt , who represented two of the agents in the trial and later married his client Sylvia Rafael , published the book Mange liv ( Many Lives ) in 2004 . In it he alleges that the arrested Dan Ærbel provided the Norwegian government with information about the Israeli nuclear weapons program . However, the Norwegian government decided to keep it quiet, which is why Israel's possession of atomic bombs was only revealed thirteen years later, when Mordechai Vanunu publicly commented on it in 1986 . What is certain is that Dan Ærbel, under the code name Dan Ert, was the straw man owner of the ship 'Scheersberg A', by means of which the Israeli secret services Mossad and Lekem procured material for the construction of atomic bombs in the " Operation Plumbat ".
Notes and evidence
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^ Andre Deutsch (Ed.) The Plumbat Affair . Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy and Peter Gillman, Additional research by Leni Gillman. The number of agents mentioned here and the names are based on this very extensive research. In addition to Harari, many other reports give only six actors in the so-called hit team, which is probably due to the fact that only six could be arrested, Israel refused to reveal the identity of the shooter (s) and the fictional (!) Spielberg film " Munich “shows the Caesarea unit as a group of only five agents.
Time Magazine , Aug. 6, 1973: Fatal Error . Article in TIME magazine that appeared immediately after the attack, assuming ten people involved. - ↑ The Olympic murder ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : 90-minute documentary by Sebastian Dehnhardt , Uli Weidenbach and Manfred Oldenburg ; Broadcast on August 15, 2006, 8:15 p.m. on ZDF . The film speaks of twelve passers-by killed, other sources give 22 innocent victims, four of whom are said to have been killed and 18 injured.
