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Jeremy Corbyn Denies Honoring Munich Olympics Terrorist

(JTA) — Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, denied reports that in 2014 he had honored a Palestinian perpetrator of the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes in Germany.

Corbyn, who became the head of Labour in 2015, faces Conservative Theresa May in an upcoming general election.

An article published Sunday in the Sunday Times quotes a column written by the Labour leader in October 2014 for the Morning Star in which Corbyn wrote about attending a ceremony in Tunisia “where wreaths were laid…on the graves of [those] killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991,” as Corbyn explained it.

This prompted speculation that Corbyn, whose party will contend in the general election on June 8 against the ruling Conservative Party, had honored the memory of Atef Bseiso, who was head of intelligence for the PLO and was involved in the murder of the Israeli athletes as part of the 1972 Black September terrorist operation in Munich. Bseiso was killed in Paris in 1992.

But spokespeople for Corbyn told Board of Deputies President Jonathan Arkush that “Jeremy Corbyn condemns the Munich massacre and its perpetrators, and that what he was attending was not anything to do with perpetrator Atef Bseiso, but an event to commemorate the 1985 bombing of the PLO headquarters,” the board wrote in a statement Monday.

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