THE Palestinian who masterminded the Munich Olympics massacre — which is the subject of a new Steven Spielberg film — said yesterday that he had no regrets about the kidnapping that ended in the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes.

Mohammad Daoud, who led Black September, the Palestine Liberation Organisation splinter group that carried out the 1972 attack, scoffed at Spielberg’s description of the film as a “prayer for peace” that would encourage reconciliation in the Middle East and complained that he had not been consulted about the plotline.

“If he [Spielberg] really wanted to make it a prayer for peace he should have listened to both sides of the story and reflected reality, rather than serving the Zionist side alone,” Daoud told the Reuters news agency in a telephone interview from Damascus, where he now lives.

Spielberg’s Munich, which opened in the United States last week and is released in Britain next month, dramatises the reprisals by Israel that followed the deaths of its athletes. A German rescue attempt was botched and five of the eight hijackers were also killed.

The film says that Golda Meir, then Israel’s Prime Minister, ordered a Mossad task force codenamed Caesarea to track down and kill those responsible for the operation. Eleven Palestinians were killed but there is some argument over whether they were the real culprits.

Daoud, 68, who used the nom de guerre Abu Daoud, said that he had yet to see the film, but believed that Spielberg’s storyline pandered to the Jewish state. He complained that two widows of the dead Israeli athletes had been given a private screening of the film in Tel Aviv. “Spielberg showed the movie to widows of the Israeli victims, but he neglected the families of Palestinian victims,” said Daoud. “How many Palestinian civilians were killed before and after Munich?”

Daoud offered no apology for the Munich attack and sought to justify the bloody outcome. “We did not target Israeli civilians. Some of them [the Israeli athletes] had taken part in wars and killed many Palestinians,” he said. “Whether a pianist or an athlete, any Israeli is a soldier.”

Daoud himself survived an assassination attempt in 1981 in Poland that he blamed on Mossad. But Aaron Klein, the Israeli author of the recently published Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response, claimed that the shooting had been carried out not by Mossad, but by a rival Palestinian faction.

Daoud, who planned but did not take part in the massacre, was allowed to enter Israel in 1996 so that he could travel to the Gaza Strip — after Yassir Arafat returned from exile — for a PLO meeting called to rescind an article in the PLO Charter calling for the eradication of Israel.

In his 1999 French-language autobiography Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich Daoud claimed that Arafat, who professed no prior knowledge of the Munich operation, had been fully briefed beforehand and had given the mission his blessing.

Nowadays Daoud feels he could still be an Israeli target and keeps a low profile in the Syrian capital, only occasionally visiting his wife in Amman. He does not dare visit his son and daughter, who live in the West Bank. Although Mossad veterans insist that the reprisal killings for the Munich massacre are over, Daoud believes he is still an Israeli target.

“When I chose a long time ago to be a revolutionary fighter I prepared to be a martyr,” he said. “I am not afraid, because people’s souls are in God’s hands, not Israel’s.”

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