DAMASCUS: Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud, was the leading figure in Black September, an off-shoot of the Palestine Liberation Organisation formed after the violent expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in September 1970.
In 1972, he travelled to Germany in advance of the Olympics to prepare for the kidnapping of the Israeli team at the Games.
Two athletes were killed in the raid and a further nine, along with five of the terrorists and a German policeman, in a botched rescue effort.
Abu Daoud survived several close shaves in the course of a life in which he was also at one time suspected of being a Jordanian double agent within the group.
He was wounded in the leg in a gun battle in 1970, arrested by French police who failed to extradite him to Germany for charges over Munich, and escaped with his life after an assassination attempt in Poland in 1981 in which he was shot 13 times in the jaw, chest, stomach, and wrist.
He ascribed the attack to a Palestinian double agent recruited by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, who he said was later captured and executed by the PLO. He saw many of the operatives he used in the Munich operation killed, almost certainly by Mossad, in subsequent years.
He was proud of his role in the Munich attack, which he said was planned in a cafe in Rome, but insisted that the intention had been to use the Israelis as hostages for negotiations for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
He was born in East Jerusalem, where he lived until the Six Days War in 1967. He spent his last years in Damascus, Syria, where he died of kidney failure on Saturday morning.