Leader of Achille Lauro hijacking dies in Iraq
Had been in custody of US since last year
WASHINGTON -- Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking, died while in US military custody in Iraq, the Pentagon said yesterday.
Abbas had been held by the US military since he was captured in Baghdad last April.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Abbas died Monday, apparently of natural causes. "Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful," Whitman said.
The official said Abbas, believed to be 56, had a history of heart disease. An autopsy is planned.
Pentagon officials would not say where in Iraq Abbas had been held, but one official said he received "appropriate medical treatment" while in custody.
Abbas was captured when Marines swarmed a suspected training camp on the outskirts of Baghdad. It was not known whether Abbas had a role in the training camp, which at the time was described as a facility operated by the Palestine Liberation Front, a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Abbas headed the PLF in 1985, when several of its members commandeered the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship that was leaving Egypt on its way to Israel and demanded the release of 50 Palestinians held by Israel.
After they were denied permission to dock in Syria, the guerrillas shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled 69-year-old American Jew. They dumped Klinghoffer and his wheelchair overboard. After negotiations, the hijackers agreed to drop their demands and leave the ship in exchange for passage to Tunisia aboard an Egyptian commercial airliner. That plane was forced by US Navy fighters to land in Sicily, where four hijackers and Abbas were arrested by Italian authorities.
The Italians concluded they lacked sufficient evidence to hold Abbas and released him. Since then, he had been sentenced in absentia to five life terms in Italy.
After Abbas's capture last year, US officials weighed action to take against him, including returning him to Italy or bringing him to the United States. Officials would not say yesterday whether legal action was being taken against Abbas or whether he was being interrogated.
Wasil Abu Yousef, the head of the PLF for the West Bank and Gaza, reacted angrily yesterday when told that the Pentagon had confirmed Abbas's death. He said the US government should be held responsible for holding Abbas in custody for nearly a year without filing charges and called for an inquiry into the cause of death.
US intelligence officials said last year that they doubted whether Abbas remained an active militant and Abbas himself denounced the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Abbas had spent the years between his release from Italy and his capture last year traveling the Middle East.
In the mid-1990s, Abbas apologized for the shooting of Klinghoffer, saying it was part of a botched "military" operation.
"The killing of the passenger was a mistake. . . . We are sorry," he said.
The apology was never accepted by the slain man's family, who dismissed him as a "murderous terrorist."
Material from The Associated Press was included in this report.
