The PLO began its own armed operations in 1965. The PLO's membership comprises separate and possibly contending paramilitary and political factions, the largest of which include Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Factions of the PLO have advocated or carried out acts of terrorism. Abu Iyad organized the Fatah splinter group Black September in 1970; the group is arguably best known for seizing eleven Israeli athletes as hostages at the September 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. All the athletes and five Black September operatives died during a gun battle with the West German police in what later became known as the Munich massacre. The PFLP, founded in 1967 by George Habash, on September 6, 1970 hijacked three international passenger planes, landing two of them in Jordan and blowing up the third. Fatah leader and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat publicly renounced terrorism in December 1988 on behalf of the PLO, but Israel has stated that it has proof that Arafat continued to sponsor terrorism until his death in 2004. In the 1974 Ma'alot massacre 22 Israeli high-school students, aged 14 to 16 from Safed were killed by three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Before reaching the school, the trio shot and killed two Arab women, a Jewish man, his pregnant wife, and their 4-year-old son, and wounded several others. The People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) or Mujahedin-e Khalq (founded in 1965), is a socialist Islamic group that has fought Iran's government since the Khomeini revolution. The group originated to oppose capitalism and what it perceived as western exploitation of Iran under the Shah. The group would go on to play an important role in the Shah's overthrow but was unable to capitalize on this in the following power-vacuum. The group is suspected of having a membership of between 10,000 and 30,000. The group renounced violence in 2001 but remains a proscribed terror-organization in Iran and in the United States. The EU, however, has removed the group from its terror list. The PMOI is accused of supporting other groups such as the Jundallah. In 1975 Hagop Tarakchian and Hagop Hagopian, with the help of sympathetic Palestinians, founded the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.