Lillehammer Affair

The murder of Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter, by Mossad on July 21, 1973 in Lillehammer, Norway. Israeli secret service agents had mistaken an innocent civilian for Ali Hassan Salameh, head of operations for the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September and alleged mastermind of the Munich massacre. Six members of the Mossad were arrested by the Norwegian police and convicted for their involvement in the crime, although none of them served the full sentence. The operation was a severe blow to the reputation of the Mossad, which managed to kill the real Salameh in 1979.

Background

The Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, had deployed a covert military operation, known as "Wrath of God," to assassinate individuals who had participated in the 1972 Munich massacre, in which eleven members of the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian Black September terrorists. Among their targets was Ali Hassan Salameh, head of operations for that organization. Since then, Mossad had killed five people allegedly involved in the events.

In the summer of 1973, Israel received information that Salameh had been located in Lillehammer, Norway, allegedly working as a waiter in a hotel. The intelligence service sent a delegation of fifteen people to investigate the clue, among whom were the general director Zvi Zamir and the head of operations Michael Harari. The agents sent to the hotel reinforced their hypothesis when they saw another being investigated, a courier of Palestinian origin, having a conversation in French with the waiter. Since Salameh was a polyglot and the suspect physically resembled him, they concluded that it was the same person.

However, Salameh had never been to Norway; The waiter was actually Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan immigrant of Algerian descent and brother of Chico Bouchikhi, the founder of Gipsy Kings. Bouchikhi had no political involvement, had lived in Lillehammer for years and had married Torill Larsen, a woman Norwegian woman who was pregnant at the time. In turn, the local police suspected the presence of the Israelis and began to monitor their movements.

Murder

On the night of July 21, 1973, one day after the misidentification, Mossad agents carried out the murder. Ahmed Bouchiki and his wife had gone to the cinema, took a bus and walked from the station to his house. Four members of the Israeli secret service were waiting for him near the house: two to carry out the crime and two others inside a rented car. Although one of the agents warned that the suspect spoke fluent Norwegian, which ruled out Salameh, Harari authorized the operation. A few meters from his house, the agents stopped Bouchiki and without saying a word they shot him twelve times at point-blank range, in front of his wife, and then fled in the vehicle at full speed. Ahmed had died instantly, and although The police were unable to arrest the culprits, but they were able to identify the cars in which they fled.

Bouchiki's crime shocked the residents of Lillehammer, where there had not been a murder for decades. The Israeli delegation realized that they had killed the wrong person the next morning, when the news broke in the press. Nine of the agents, including Harari and the four directly involved, managed to flee Norway that same day, but the police managed to arrest the remaining six: two of them – Dan Aerbel and Marianne Gladnikoff – while trying to return the rented vehicles, and four others – Sylvia Raphael, Abraham Gehmer, Zwi Steinberg and Michael Dorf – in a safe house in Bærum, with the identities provided during interrogation. The owner of the house was a member of the Israeli diplomatic corps.

During the course of the investigation it was found that Sylvia Raphael used the identity of Canadian Patricia Roxborough, a secretary whose passport had been stolen a few months earlier in her Montreal office.

Consequences

The detainees were tried in Norway in February 1974: five of them were found guilty of having participated in the murder, while Dorf was free of all charges. And despite the fact that they had been sentenced to prison terms of up to six years, all of them were released early and deported to Israel in 1975. The Norwegian investigation that was carried out and the revelations of the captured agents compromised Mossad assets in Europe, including safe houses, agents and operatives.. Likewise, serious errors were revealed in the identification of the suspect that led Mossad to change its modus operandi.

After the incident, international outrage was unleashed, forcing Prime Minister Golda Meir to suspend Operation Wrath of God. Zvi Zamir left the Mossad leadership in 1974. Harari also resigned, but Meir He refused to accept it and kept him within the agency. Five years later the operation was resumed under a new prime minister, Menachem Begin, to search for those involved in the Munich massacre who were still alive. Ali Hassan Salameh ended up being executed by Mossad on January 22, 1979, by means of a car bomb in Beirut (Lebanon) that also killed four bodyguards and four civilians.

The Norwegian justice system reopened the case in 1990, and the Norwegian government carried out a commission of inquiry. Its conclusions state that the Israeli action represented a «violation of national sovereignty » and that the Norwegian authorities had reduced the sentence so as not to damage diplomatic relations with Israel, but denied any collaboration of its security forces. Although in 1998 an international arrest warrant was issued against Michael Harari as the main perpetrator, it was withdrawn at the time. following year.

After two decades denying any responsibility, in January 1996 the Israeli government of Shimon Peres paid compensation to Bouchiki's widow and daughter.