Achille Lauro Hijacking

On October 7, 1985, four Palestinian militants seized the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off Port Said, Egypt. The hijackers, under the command of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) leader Abu Abbas, held the more than 400 people aboard hostage for two days. The hijackers shot Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound, Jewish passenger from New York, and dumped his body overboard. Klinghoffer's body later washed ashore on a Syrian beach.

Threatening to blow up the ship, the hijackers demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Egyptian and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials negotiated with the hijackers, and Abbas, who was not on the liner but claimed responsibility as the leader of the men on board. Abbas had commanded the radical PLF faction for many years and was known for having sent his men on surprise raids into the heart of Israel on hang gliders and balloons. However, at the time of the hijacking, he was also a member of the PLO's executive committee.

Six British women aboard the ship—five members of a dance troupe and the ship's beautician—later spoke to the press. The women explained that one of the hijackers had watched over them amid death threats from the other three, and that the British and American passengers had been separated from other passengers. The ship docked in Cairo, where Abbas negotiated the exchange of the ship and the hostages for free passage to Tunis in North Africa for himself and his men. However, U.S. fighter planes intercepted the plane carrying the five men to Tunis and forced it to land in Sicily. Three of the hijackers were arrested in Italy, but the Italian government refused to turn Abbas and two associates over to the U.S. Marines. Instead, Abbas and his cohorts were assisted in fleeing to the former Yugoslavia.

In 1986 an Italian court tried Abbas in absentia and sentenced him to life in prison. He was never arrested, however. That same year, Abbas discussed the Achille Lauro hijacking in a controversial NBC news interview. He denied that his men had killed Klinghoffer, only to later publicly acknowledge that they had. He also maintained that the men did not know that Klinghoffer was American or Jewish. During countless interviews, however, Abbas always maintained that the Achille Lauro hijacking had not gone according to plan. He asserted that the goal of the hijackers was to use the Achille Lauro to sail to the Israeli port of Ashdod, and to then attack the nearby naval base.

In 1996 Abbas publicly embraced the peace process and Israel allowed him to enter Gaza despite the international warrant for his arrest. The U.S. government abandoned efforts to extradite Abbas and dropped the warrant for his arrest after the statute of limitations expired. In 2003, Abbas was captured by U.S. troops in Baghdad during the overthrow of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but he died in U.S. custody before he could be extradited or tried.

Marilyn Klinghoffer, who had been forcibly separated from her husband by the hijackers before they murdered him, died of cancer several months after the hijacking. In her obituary, The Washington Post reported that, after returning from Italy, Mrs. Klinghoffer told President Reagan that she had spit in the faces of the hijackers as she identified them. “God bless you,” Reagan reportedly replied. Although the PLO settled a $1.5 billion court case with the Klinghoffer family in 1997, the group has always asserted that the hijackers were working without their support.

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