Terror Aboard the Achille Lauro

By Mitchell Bard

On October 7, 1985, four members of one of the PLO's factions, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak persuaded the hijackers to surrender, but not before they shot to death a wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger from the United States named Leon Klinghoffer, dumping his body overboard.

Mubarak allowed the PLF leader and hijacking mastermind, Mohammed Abbas, and the other terrorists to fly to their headquarters in Tunisia. President Ronald Reagan sent U.S. warplanes to intercept the flight, however, and forced it to land at a U.S.-Italian air base in Sicily. The United States and Italy fought over jurisdiction in the case, but the Italians refused to extradite any of the men.

Inexplicably, Abbas was allowed to go to Yugoslavia. An Italian court convicted 11 of 15 others associated with the hijacking, while Abbas and another terrorist were tried in absentia and found guilty. Abbas was sentenced to life in prison. Bassam al-Asker, one of the Achille Lauro hijackers, was granted parole in 1991. Ahmad Marrouf al-Assadi, another accomplice, disappeared in 1991 while on parole.

Abbas was never arrested. In 1990, he struck again from the sea, with an abortive speedboat attack on bathers on a beach near Tel Aviv.

Though he was sentenced to five life terms in Italy, and was wanted in the United States, Abbas remained a free man. He spent most of the years after the hijacking in Tunisia before moving to the Gaza Strip in April 1996, after the Palestinian Authority took control of the area as part of the peace agreement with Israel.

While in Gaza, Abbas said he was sorry for the hijacking, but the daughters of Leon Klinghoffer said that Abbas had been convicted of murder and should serve his sentence (CNN, April 23, 1996). As a result of the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian interim peace agreement, however, Abbas and other PLO members were granted immunity for violent acts committed before the signing of the September 1993 Oslo agreement.

Abbas eventually made his way to Iraq where he was believed to be a conduit for Saddam Hussein's payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Abbas was captured by U.S. forces in a raid in Iraq on April 15, 2003. He died on March 9, 2004, at the age of 56 in U.S. custody in Iraq. Klinghoffer's daughters said, “Now, with his death, justice will be denied. The one consolation for us is that Abul Abbas died in captivity, not as a free man.”