Captured cruise-ship hijacker dies in U.S. custody in Iraq

By Esther Schrader
Los Angeles Times

	Abu Abbas
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Abbas had been held by the U.S. military since he was captured in Baghdad in 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 Abbas had been held in Iraq.

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.

Israeli intelligence officials say the PLF faction under Abbas was a conduit for Saddam Hussein's payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel reported earlier this year that it captured several Palestinians who trained at a PLF camp in Iraq and were told by Abbas to attack an Israeli airport and other targets.

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. Klinghoffer and his wheelchair were thrown 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. U.S. Navy fighters forced the plane to land in Sicily, where four hijackers and Abbas were arrested. 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' capture last year, the Palestinian Authority had demanded his release, saying the United States had pledged not to prosecute him as part of an agreement not to press charges against Palestinians who acted against Israel before interim peace accords were signed in the 1990s.
 
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."

Klinghoffer's daughters, Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, said that Abbas' death deprived them of the right to hold him legally accountable, The Associated Press reported.

"Our hopes were raised last year, when he was captured in Iraq by U.S. troops and arrested," said the daughters, who live in New York. "Now, with his death, justice will be denied. The one consolation for us is that Abul Abbas died in captivity, not as a free man."

Los Angeles Times Staff writers Ken Ellingwood in Jerusalem and Jon Marino in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report. Background material from The Associated Press.

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