Germany holds Munich Olympics massacre probe 50 years on

BERLIN, Germany (AFP) - Germany on Friday said it had appointed an international commission to probe security failings that allowed a deadly attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

The independent investigation comes as part of an agreement with victims' families reached last year, five decades after the assault that left 11 Israelis dead.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said it was "shameful" that "agonising questions" were long left unresolved.

"For too many years, there was a lack of understanding or reappraisal of the events, transparency about them or acceptance of responsibility for them," she said in a statement.

Berlin is "keenly aware of this, and it has informed our actions, especially when it comes to supporting the family members and finally conducting a thorough reappraisal of what happened," she said.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier last September asked for "forgiveness" from families of victims after a long, bitter fight for appropriate compensation and for Berlin to own up to mistakes made that led to the massacre.

On September 5, 1972, eight gunmen of the Palestinian militant group Black September stormed into the Israeli team's flat at the Olympic village, shooting dead two and taking nine Israelis hostage.

West German police responded with a bungled rescue operation in which all nine hostages were killed, along with five of the eight hostage-takers and a police officer.

Despite the devastation, the International Olympic Committee announced on the morning of September 6 that the Games would go on.

Steinmeier summarised the episode as a triple failing: in the preparation of the Games and its security concept; the events of September 5 and 6; and the missteps that "began the day after the assassinations -- the silence, the suppression and the forgetting".

After families threatened to boycott last year's 50th anniversary ceremonies, a deal was finally agreed for Berlin to provide 28 million euros ($31 million) in compensation and appoint an investigating commission.

Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre Spitzer was killed in the hostage-taking, said in the ministry statement that the bereaved families were "very pleased that our request to open the archives and establish a commission of historians has been honoured".

The findings by the eight-member panel are to be made public, with the first meeting of the research team planned close to the 51st anniversary of the attack.