The Achille Lauro hijacking took place on 7 October 1985, when the Italian ocean liner MS Achille Lauro was hijacked by four men representing the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) off the coast of Egypt, as she was sailing from Alexandria to Ashdod, Israel. A 69-year-old Jewish-American man in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was murdered by the hijackers and thrown overboard. The hijacking sparked the "Sigonella Crisis".
Background
Palestine Liberation Organization
After the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was driven out of Jordan in 1970 and Southern Lebanon and Beirut in 1978 and 1982, respectively, PLO guerrillas had dispersed (under international guarantees of safety) to Tunisia, Yemen, Southern Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and the Sudan.
Meanwhile, in Lebanon, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat had run into problems with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who in 1983 sought to wrest effective control of the group from him by backing a mutiny within the PLO. Arafat was backed by the Soviet Union and was helped to escape Lebanon by the president's brother, Rifaat al-Assad, and his "Red Knights" of Alawite notables near the Lebanese border with Syria. When the attempt to wrest control failed, the Syrian military backed the mutineers in an attack on Arafat loyalists within the Lebanese city of Tripoli. Arafat moved his loyalists and the PLO headquarters out of Tripoli to Tunisia.
Throughout the 1980s, other members of the PLO, as well as the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), launched attacks on both civilian and military targets in the north of Israel, across the Lebanese border. One such attack by the PLO's Force 17 on September 25, 1985, targeting an Israeli yacht in Larnaca, Cyprus, killed three Israelis. In response, the Israeli Air Force bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis in Operation Wooden Leg on October 1, 1985. The headquarters was completely destroyed in this attack, and sixty PLO members were killed.
When Achille Lauro was hijacked, speculation arose that this was an act of retaliation for the Israeli bombing in Tunis. This was disputed by Abu Abbas' widow Reem al-Nimer in 2013. According to al-Nimer, the hijacking had been planned eleven months in advance, and the hijackers had already been on two 'dummy' training runs on Achille Lauro. The plan was to open fire on Israeli soldiers when the ship reached Ashdod – a suicide mission.
Palestinian Liberation Front
The hijacking of Achille Lauro was planned and executed by one of the three factions of the PLF. The first faction was headed by Taalat Yacoub, a Palestinian who opposed Arafat and was supported by Syria. The second faction was headed by Abd al-Fatah Ghanim, who also opposed Arafat. The last faction was headed by Abbas, who was loyal to Arafat and sat on the PLO Executive Committee; his faction of the PLF had already carried out a series of armed raids in Israel and the West Bank since the late 1970s.
In exchange for the release of hostages aboard Achille Lauro, the hijackers demanded the release of Lebanese national Samir Kuntar, a friend of Abbas. Kuntar and an accomplice had been jailed by five years before for attempting on April 22, 1979, to kidnap a Jewish family in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya, close to the Lebanese border. The botched kidnapping had resulted in the death of Israeli policeman Eliyahu Shahar, 31-year-old father Danny Kaiser, and his two daughters, four-year-old Einat and two year-old Yael, leaving wife and mother Smadar Haran Kaiser as the sole survivor.
Prelude to the hijacking
Itinerary and embarkation
Achille Lauro embarked from Genoa, Italy, on 3 October 1985, with an itinerary for an eleven-day cruise which included ports of call in Alexandria in Egypt and Ashdod in Israel. The fares for a double-berthed cabin were between $955 and $1,550. The ship had become the property of the Italian government when its previous owner, Costa Lines, went bankrupt. The vessel was seized by the company's creditors, who in 1983 sold it to the state, who in turn leased it to Chandris cruise line under an agreement that would last until 1987.
The ship set out with 748 passengers. Among them was a group of close friends from New York and New Jersey who forwent their usual Jersey shore vacation in favor of a cruise. The trip celebrated the 58th birthday of Marilyn Klinghoffer, a personnel manager at a small publishing firm, who had fought colon cancer into remission, as well as her 36th wedding anniversary with Leon, who owned and operated a small appliance manufacturing firm. The pair had two adult daughters, 34-year-old Lisa, who was married, and 28-year-old Ilsa, who was engaged. Paralyzed on his right side as a result of two strokes, Leon could occasionally walk with a cane but usually relied on a wheelchair. In fact, the group had specifically chosen the Achille Lauro over other ships due to its wheelchair accessibility. Travelling with the Klinghoffers were their friends Frank and Mildred Hodes, Neil and June Kantor, Seymour and Viola Meskin, Sylvia Sherman, and Charlotte Spiegel.
Because ship hijackings were relatively rare at the time, the cruise line's security amounted to checking passports at Genoa. Standard procedure at the time did not include checking luggage. The New York Times reported at the time that the ship had security personnel, but it could not determine if they were armed. This lax security is particularly notable in a year that had already seen a spate of terrorist incidents within Europe and the Middle East, including the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, in which a hostage was slain. The TWA incident had even impacted the Mediterranean cruise business: Greece's Epirotiki Line took three of its ships – Jupiter, Jason, and Neptune – out of service when terrorism fears led to decreased travel demand overall in the region.
Early events
On Friday, October 4, Achille Lauro called in Naples, then sailed through the Straits of Messina; the Mediterranean was calm and the fall day was warm. Cruise manager Max Fico would later recall that he noticed that several young men were acting suspicious, in that they kept to themselves, refusing any of the congenial friendliness common to the other cruise guests. They claimed to be Argentinean when other guests tried to engage them in English, but did not understand fluent Spanish when it was spoken to them. They had passports from Portugal, Norway, and Argentina; later, it was theorized that they were trying to maintain a cover story.
On Sunday, October 6, the Klinghoffers and friends celebrated Marilyn's fifty-eighth birthday.
On October 7, at Alexandria, Egypt, 651 of the passengers from the Achille Lauro left for a bus tour of the pyramids. They were to rendezvous with the ship fourteen hours later at Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, 150 miles to the east.
Passengers who had stayed aboard the Achille Lauro, such as Rene Sprecher, would later report watching a camera crew record what appeared to be people running on and off the ship firing guns with blanks. At the end of this, a car arrived, and a man took two wrapped packages from it, carrying them aboard ship. It was later theorized that this was how weapons were brought aboard.
Hijacking
On Monday, October 7, 1985, four PLF militants hijacked Achille Lauro off Egypt. The exact circumstances of the hijacking remain disputed, with Abu Abbas claiming one version of events and the Italian courts later ruling it implausible.
Seizure of the ship
According to Abu Abbas, the original plan was for the PLF agents to use the ship as transport to attack a military installation in Ashdod, Israel. He explained that the four hid their weapons in the gas tank of a car parked in Italy in preparation for boarding the ship. Their smuggled weapons, still with gasoline residue on them, gave off a smell that the crew noticed but did not act on. Later, he claimed, a cabin steward entered the Palestinians' unlocked room to deliver complimentary fruits, surprising the four as they attempted to clean off their weapons. He explained that this led the agents to panic, put aside the original plan, and hijack the ship instead.
The Italian court later rejected Abbas's explanation, citing four inconsistencies. First, the hijackers offered contradictory accounts of the plan to attack Ashdod. Secondly, the stewards aboard the Achille Lauro all denied Abbas's story about walking in on the hijackers cleaning weapons. Third, the hijackers never shared any details about a planned attack on Ashdod until after the hijacking. Lastly, the court considered the timing of the hijacking too convenient, given that the vast majority of passengers had disembarked that morning, which left a much smaller crowd to control. The court ultimately concluded that Abbas had devised the attack on Ashdod as a retroactive cover story once the hijacking was unsuccessful.
The four terrorists stormed into the ship's dining room. They fired their automatic weapons over the heads of the eating passengers. Screams from the passengers meshed with the shouting of the gunmen and with the sound of falling glass shards and splinters. Viola Meskin tried to run to a door but was intercepted by a terrorist with a gun who turned her back. Austrian passenger Anna Hoeranter ran to an exit but was pushed down an adjacent flight of stairs by one of the terrorists. Other passengers ran in a panic from the dining room into the kitchen and were chased by one of the terrorists. Inside the kitchen, the pursuing terrorist beat two of the kitchen staff to the floor.
The ship's executive officer notified Captain Gerardo de Rosa that there were armed men on board, shooting at passengers. Captain De Rosa descended quickly through several decks, moving towards the ship's stern. An agitated voice came over the ship's loudspeakers requesting that he come immediately to the bridge. Arriving there, De Rosa was faced with machine guns. The terrorists fired some shots into the deck and then shouted in Arabic. They demanded he sail the ship 300 miles to the northeast, to the Syrian port of Tartus.
Due to most of the passengers having disembarked at Alexandria to tour the pyramids, only 97 remained on board and became hostages.
The hijackers rounded up the rest of the passengers aboard and herded them into the dining room. They missed Hoeranter, who, after having been pushed down the stairs by a terrorist, had entered the first open cabin she found and had hidden in the bathroom. She would remain there until found by the cleaning staff four days later (after the hijackers had left). She survived on two apples she had found and rationed.
The terrorists ordered Captain De Rosa to instruct the 450 crew members to continue with their normal duties but to stay clear of the hostages. They claimed to have a total of 20 hijackers on board. Only later would De Rosa and his officers discover that there were only four hijackers.
Within the dining room, the terrorists put on displays of power to intimidate the hostages, menacing them with their machine guns, and pulling the pins from their grenades but keeping the safety levers depressed. They had two of the women hostages hold the live grenades, causing the worry that if they fell asleep, the safety levers would detach, causing an explosion. The hijackers veered erratically from politeness to barbarity – one moment one would wash a cup for a hostage to use, the next a hijacker would ram a gun stock into Mrs. Klinghoffer to force her from the floor, then a hijacker would escort a captive to her cabin to change out of a wet swimsuit. The hijackers also tried to engage in some political persuasion, telling the hostages "Reagan no good, Arafat good."
Before the hijackers enforced radio silence, the crew of the Achille Lauro managed to send out an S.O.S. that was picked up by a monitoring facility in Sweden. This alerted the international community that Palestinians had seized an Italian ship.
As night approached, the hijackers took all the hostages up several decks to the Arazzi Lounge on the Promenade deck and gave them blankets to spend the night. While they ordered the ship's kitchen to send food up for the hostages, they placed containers they claimed were filled with gasoline around the room (apparently as a bluff to ward off the ship's crew). Despite fears of grenades and gasoline, the passengers attempted to sleep on the floor while the ship sailed for Syria.