UA 19-year-old man was arrested after giving the Hitler salute as a delegation of Israeli athletes passed by on the sidelines of the European Athletics Championships, Munich police said on Wednesday. The sixteen athletes went to a monument erected in memory of the victims of the attack perpetrated in 1972 by the Palestinian organization “Black September” at the Munich Olympics, which cost the lives of eleven members of the Israeli delegation.
The incident, which occurred on a bridge linking the stadium to the former Olympic village now inhabited by private individuals, was observed by the police themselves who were escorting the delegation to the monument. “In the current state of the investigation, the group had not noticed” the gesture of the young man, a security agent domiciled in Berlin, said – in a press release – the police. The latter was immediately arrested by the police, who released him after filing a complaint against him. No details were given on his nationality by the authorities. According to the daily Suddeutsche Zeitunghe is a German citizen with an “Arabic name”.
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Israel’s Ambassador-designate to Germany, Ron Prosor, retweeted the article, commenting: “The dislike (from the Arabic-speaking world) must end. No tolerance for anti-Semitism anywhere. In Germany, the Hitler salute or the wearing of Nazi signs such as the swastika are punishable by law and can be punished by fines or sentences of up to three years in prison. The incident comes at a time when Germany is preparing to mark, in a tense climate, the 50e anniversary of the attack which took place on 5 September.
The families of the victims have indeed announced that they will decline the invitation to attend the ceremonies. They demand from the German authorities “public apologies” for “all their errors” and their “lies” in this affair, to “open all” their archives, as well as “just financial compensation”. The German authorities were held partly responsible for the bloody outcome of the hostage-taking, which ended at the Fürstenfeldbruck military base, about thirty kilometers from Munich.
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As the commemoration of the attack approached, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his part, during a press conference on Tuesday with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, refused to answer a question about the attack in Munich, comparing instead the crimes committed against the Palestinians to a holocaust, remarks strongly condemned in particular in Israel and Germany.