TERRORISTS: L'Affaire Daoud: Too Hot to Handle

The sad-eyed man with the droopy mustache returned to Paris' fashionable Hôtel Résidence Saint-Honoré at 7:30 on a Friday evening. When he walked in, the men waiting for him identified themselves as agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French counterintelligence agency. They asked him to come to headquarters for a routine identity check. He did so without protest. Four days later the suspect was released—thereby touching off one of the most explosive international brouhahas in years. The affair triggered political repercussions from the Quai d'Orsay to the Nile, raised storms of outrage in Jerusalem and Bonn, severely embarrassed the government of French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and touched off outcries against the cynical expediency of French justice.

The man at the center of the storm was Abu Daoud, 39, a member of the Revolutionary Military Command of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Abu Daoud (real name: Mohammed Daoud Mohammed Auda) is a mysterious figure in the P.L.O.'s terrorist operations who is widely believed to have had a key role in the 1972 Munich massacre in which 17 people died, including eleven Israeli athletes (see box). Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon denounced Abu Daoud as an "arch-terrorist" last week; curiously, Israeli intelligence officials—who might have had a special interest in seeing a notorious terrorist apprehended—insisted that since Abu Daoud was now primarily a kind of roving ambassador for the fedayeen movement, he was not on their list of wanted men.

Iraqi Passport. That was certainly not the only anomaly in the affair. Even the circumstances of Abu Daoud's arrest in Paris were strange. He had come to the French capital as a member of a high-ranking Palestinian delegation to attend the funeral of Mahmoud Saleh, a former P.L.O. representative who had been gunned down a few days earlier on a Paris street. Traveling on an Iraqi passport issued in the name of Youssef Hanna Raji, Abu Daoud made no effort to disguise his easily recognizable features. He breezed through immigration and checked into his $33-a-day room.

Two policemen, thoughtfully provided by the Foreign Ministry, stood guard at the front door of his hotel. Along with the rest of the delegation, Abu Daoud was invited to the Quai d'Orsay, where he met with the Director for Middle East Affairs. That same evening he was taken into custody by the DST agents.

Ordinarily, the detention of a suspected Arab terrorist would have been cleared with Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski and probably with President Giscard himself. But Poniatowski apparently discovered that Abu Daoud was in DST hands only a couple of hours before the West German Interior Minister called him to say that Bonn wanted the Palestinian held, pending a formal extradition request.