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- Country of residence: Palestine
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Mohammad Daoud Oudeh, commonly known by his nom de guerre Mohammad or Mohammad Oudeh (1937, – 3 July 2010) was a Palestinian known as the planner, architect and mastermind of the Munich massacre. He served in a number of commanding functions in Fatah's armed units in Palestinian camp Lebanon and Jordan who originally came from Israel. Oudeh was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. He was a teacher by training. He taught physics and maths in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Then he worked at the justice ministry of Kuwait and studied law. He lived in Jerusalem until the 1967 Six-Day War, when he was displaced as Israel recaptured the eastern portion of the city; he resettled in Jordan, where he joined the PLO. In 1970, Mohammad was one of the founders of Fatah. From 1971, he was leader of the Black September, a Fatah offshoot created to avenge the September 1970 expulsion of the Fedayeen Movement from Jordan and carry out international operations. The group gained international notoriety for its role in the Munich massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which a number of athletes on the Israeli team were taken hostage by Black September. Eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman were killed by the end of the multi-day standoff. On 1 August 1981, Oudeh was shot five times from a distance of around two meters in the coffee shop of the Victoria Inter-Continental Hotel in Warsaw, but he survived the attack, chasing his would-be assassin down to the front entrance before collapsing. Oudeh claimed the attempted assassination was carried out by a Palestinian double agent recruited by the Mossad, and claimed the would-be assassin was executed by the PLO ten years later.
After the 1993 Oslo Accords, he moved to Ramallah in the West Bank. Following a trip to Jordan and the publication of his memoirs, Oudeh was banned from returning to Ramallah. He settled with his family in Syria, the only country that would take him. He lived on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority and gave interviews to Aljazeera and other Arab and international media outlets about his life, the Munich events, and Palestinian politics. Oudeh was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996, so he could attend a PLO meeting in the Gaza Strip to rescind an article in the PLO charter calling for Israel's eradication.
As a commander of Black September, Mohammad was the mastermind behind the Munich massacre. He planned the operation, briefed the execution cell on the specifics of the operation, and accompanied the members of the execution cell to the Olympic Village by taxi on the night/early morning of the attack. It was on the evening of 4 September 1972, the day before the operation commenced in the early morning of 5 September 1972, that Abu Daoud briefed the assassination squad and issued final instructions over dinner in a restaurant at the Munich railway station.
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