ACHILLE LAURO

Name of an Italian passenger-liner hijacked by a commando of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) on 8 October 1985 near Alexandria, Egypt. This operation was undertaken in reprisal for an Israeli raid carried out seven days previously on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunis. The group, consisting of four persons and commanded by Majid al-Malki, was supervised externally by Khalid Abdul Rahim (Petros Floros, Hussein Khalid). During the operation, an American Jewish citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was killed by one of the terrorists. Meanwhile, the leader of the PLF, Muhammad Zaydan (Abu al-Abbas), who had arrived on the scene, ordered the commando to surrender to Egyptian authorities.

In the night of 10–11 October, American fighter planes intercepted the Egyptian plane carrying members of the commando group and forced it to land at a North American Treaty Organization (NATO) base in Sicily. There, at the end of a face-to-face confrontation between the Italian police forces and the members of a special American unit, on a mission to capture the terrorists, the commando was arrested by the Italian police, while Zaydan was released and left Italy for Belgrade. On 14 October, the United States issued an international arrest warrant against Zaydan. Later a court in Genoa, Italy, sentenced the four hijackers to prison terms of four to nine years.

In January 1986 Zaydan traveled to Iraq via Cairo, Egypt. On 2 July, the Genoa court sentenced the leader of the PLF, in absentia, to life imprisonment. The attorney general had asked for life imprisonment for the leader of the commando as well as for four other Palestinians who had supplied logistical help to the group. On 22 April 1987, Zaydan, as member of the executive committee of the PLO, participated in the Congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC) that was held in Algiers. Indignant, the United States protested officially to the Algerian authorities against his presence. Under American pressure, the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, demanded that Zaydan be expelled from the PLO.

SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir;Palestine Liberation Front (1977);Palestine Liberation Organization;Palestine National Council.