IT WAS an event that shocked the world — the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972.

Israel vowed revenge and in the weeks and months that followed agents from Mossad, the feared secret service, were deployed across Europe and the Middle East to kill those held responsible for the atrocity.

Now Steven Spielberg has made a film about the events that followed the Olympic massacre. Munich, a $70 million production, whose cast includes Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, will not reach cinemas until December 23, but already it is being tipped for an Oscar.

Yet even as Israelis prepare to revisit one of the most painful episodes in their country’s history, there is heated debate about the wisdom of giving such an atrocity the full Hollywood treatment. What’s more, there are claims that the version of events portrayed in the film is incorrect.

Spielberg has kept an uncharacteristically low profile in the days leading up the film’s release. He has given just one interview, to Time magazine, in which he describes Munich as “a prayer for peace” which, he hopes, will provoke a debate about terrorism.

Munich is billed by its makers as a dramatisation “inspired by real events.” It appears to rely heavily on one account of the massacre’s aftermath detailed in the 1984 book by George Jonas, called Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

Mr Jonas’s inquiry focused on the testimony of Yuval Aviv who represented himself as a Mossad agent heading the assassination squad, though it denies knowledge of him.

But Aviv’s account has been widely discredited as new information about the operation has come to light. Israel, it has been alleged, used the Olympic massacre as a pretext to launch an offensive against Palestinian militants, striking against a number of operatives who played no part in the Munich attack but were considered enemies of the Israeli state.

Aaron Klein, an Israeli author whose own account will be published three days before the film is released, claims that just one of the Palestinians killed by Mossad was involved in the kidnapping and murder.

The 1992 assassination in Paris of Atef Bseiso, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s head of intelligence, was “100 per cent” Israeli vengeance, say Mr Klein, whose book is called Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response.”

But other killings had the purpose of perpetuating the myth, fostered by Israelis and Palestinians for their own ends, that shadowy Israeli agents operated at will in Europe and the Middle East.

The film-makers insist they did their own research and interviewed the real-life troubled figure portrayed in the movie as “Avner Kauffmann”, the Israeli hit team’s chief.

Mr Klein spent over a year tracing and interviewing more than 50 key figures involved in the operation, including Mossad directors and operative.

The litany of shootings, booby-trap assassinations and commando raids against Palestinians in the months and years that followed bolstered the myth of an omnipotent Mossad. But Mr Klein claims most of those killed were not responsible for Munich and the real planners and executors went to ground in Arab and Eastern-bloc countries beyond Israeli reach.

“The fact is that the people they killed weren’t involved in Munich,” said Mr Klein. “But at the time they thought they were and didn’t care too much about how. The Israelis were afraid it was just the start of series of kidnappings and killings, and they were determined to prevent that. It was about prevention, not revenge.”

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