Achille Lauro Hijacked: Klinghoffer Killed at Sea

Four Palestinian gunmen seized control of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the eastern Mediterranean on October 7, 1985, holding more than 400 passengers and crew hostage for two days. When the hijackers were denied permission to dock at the Syrian port of Tartus, they shot Leon Klinghoffer — a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound American Jewish tourist — and ordered crew members to push his body and wheelchair overboard into the sea. The hijackers belonged to the Palestine Liberation Front, a faction led by Abu Abbas that operated under the umbrella of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Their original plan was not to seize the ship but to disembark at the Israeli port of Ashdod and carry out a commando attack. When a crew member discovered them cleaning their weapons in a cabin, the plan collapsed and the four men — Bassam al-Ashker, Ahmad Marrouf al-Assadi, Youssef Majed al-Molqi, and Abdul Rahim Khaled — improvised the hijacking. Klinghoffer's murder horrified the world. He and his wife Marilyn had booked the Mediterranean cruise as a vacation; both suffered from health problems, and Leon was partially paralyzed from two strokes. The killers selected him because he was American and Jewish. Al-Molqi later admitted to pulling the trigger. The act transformed what might have been remembered as a hostage negotiation into an international outrage centered on a single, gratuitously cruel killing. After negotiations mediated by Egypt, the hijackers surrendered in Port Said, Egypt, in exchange for a promise of safe passage. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declared them gone from the country. They were not. U.S. intelligence located the Egyptian commercial aircraft carrying the four hijackers and Abu Abbas out of Egypt, and President Reagan ordered Navy F-14 fighters to intercept the plane. The jets forced the aircraft to land at a NATO base in Sicily — a dramatic act of aerial interception that generated both American celebration and Italian fury, since the operation occurred on Italian soil without permission. Italian authorities prosecuted the hijackers; al-Molqi received a thirty-year sentence. Abu Abbas escaped Italian custody, was convicted in absentia, and lived in Baghdad until American forces captured him during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He died in U.S. custody in 2004.