Abbas, Muhammad “Abu” (1948–)

aka Muhammad Zaidan

Muhammad “Abu” Abbas is the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front–Abu Abbas Faction (PLF), a Marxist militant group perhaps best known for its hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985. Abbas was a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee for many years, remaining loyal to Yasir Arafat during the 1980s when many other militant Palestinian leaders split with the PLO.

Abbas was born in 1948 in Haifa, in what is now Israel. He has often told interviewers that he was just 13 days old when his family fled to a refugee camp in Lebanon. He reportedly joined the PLO's army in 1964, and fought with the Vietcong against U.S. forces in Vietnam.

Abbas joined Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC) in the late 1960s. In 1977, he became alienated by the pro-Syrian leanings of the PFLP-GC and left to form the PLF. As a leader of the PLF, Abbas plotted several unorthodox attacks on Israel. In 1981, PLF members attempted to invade Israel by flying over the Lebanese border in hang gliders and a hot air balloon; both attempts were foiled by the Israeli military.

Abbas was deputy secretary of the PLF when the group split into three factions: pro-Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization, pro-Syrian, and pro-Libyan. Abbas led the pro-PLO faction and remained loyal to Arafat during the 1980s when many others began to defect from the PLO leader's control.

Abbas became a member of the PLO executive committee in 1984, and his close association with Arafat and the PLO soon came under international scrutiny. Four PLF members hijacked the Achille Lauro on October 7, 1985, off Port Said, Egypt, as it sailed toward Israel. Abbas's men demanded the release of 50 Palestinians held in Israel and threatened to blow up the ship. They held hundreds of passengers hostage for two days. During the ordeal, the hijackers shot and killed an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair named Leon Klinghoffer and threw his body overboard.

While the Achille Lauro was in the hands of the hijackers, Abbas negotiated with Egyptian officials and secured safe passage to Tunisia for himself, the hijackers, and another PLF official in return for the hostages' release. An EgyptAir plane carrying the PLF members took off for Tunisia, but U.S. Air Force fighter jets forced the plane to land in Sicily, where Italian forces arrested three of the hijackers. Abbas and other PLF members, however, fled to the former Yugoslavia with the help of Italian authorities, provoking protests by the U.S. government.

Abbas has repeatedly claimed that the hijacking was a mistake and that he had planned for his men to travel undercover on the Achille Lauro until it docked at Ashdod, Israel. The PLF subsequently moved its base of operations to Iraq.

Abbas has never served time in jail, although an Italian court tried him in absentia for his leadership role in the Achille Lauro hijacking and sentenced him to life in prison. The U.S. Department of Justice dropped its international warrant for Abbas's arrest [Page 2]after the Italian conviction, saying that there was not enough evidence to try him in a U.S. court.

Abbas left the PLO in 1991, after a foiled PLF raid onto an Israeli beach created a diplomatic crisis between the PLO and Washington. He did support the Oslo Accords in 1993 and publicly supported the peace process in 1996. He has announced that the PLF now follows a political path.

...