How Terrorists Stole an Italian Cruise Ship

Monday, October 8, 1985. The 23,000-ton Italian

cruise

ship

Akili Lauro is docked in the port of Alexandria, on the coast of Egypt. This is the fifth day of the

ship

's 12-day Mediterranean voyage that began in Genoa and visited coal ports in Naples and Syracuse. Alexandria is just another stop on this vacation

cruise

, nothing indicates that it will end up being anything more than that. At some point in the morning, hundreds of passengers begin to disembark from the ship and transfer to buses that will take them to see the Pyramids in Cairo about two and a half hours by bus.

The distance trip this Exodus leaves only between 70 and 80 passengers on board who remain with the ships Crew of 340 Once the disembarkation is complete, the captain leaves the port of Alexandria charting a course for the port of Saeed, approximately 225 kilometers east of his position here, they intend to meet the Cairo tourists in about 14 hours, however the Cairo tourists would never see the ship; They would arrive at 10:30 at night to an empty dock much later. was to arrive without finding any ship, they would wait three hours well into the night under the impression that congestion around the mouth of the Suez Canal had caused the delay, but that was not the case later that day, around 1:00 a.m. 00 p. m., the distress call was heard. had been broadcast from the Achille Laurel and picked up by a Swedish radio station in Gothenburg, four hijackers had seized the ship as it left the port of Alexandria, cornering the passengers in the dining room while they were having lunch and firing their weapons over their heads. heads and shouting orders at them, but who were these kidnappers?

What exactly do they want? Well, that wasn't immediately evident. The four men had stayed away from the passengers throughout the trip. The extent of his interactions with those on board was limited to a previous exchange with one. of the aquililauros staff a hostess had asked the group where they were from to which they responded with a terse one word answer saying only that they were Norwegians, whoever they were and whoever the target of the ship hijacking was, had caught the attention of Los The Italian and American governments and their respective crisis management teams had initially not given the kidnapping much thought, as a White House staffer at the time recalled that it seemed like another terrorist incident occurred every week, but once They learned that the American passengers were on board around 4 p.m.

They went into crisis mode as the two governments deliberated on the best course of action. The kidnappers remained very active in the Aquiles Laurel. They had taken the ship's captain, Gerardo Deroza, to the bridge, where they verbally bombarded him in Arabic before giving orders. he took him sailing towards the Syrian port of Tartus in broken English; Their claim to be Norwegian citizens was becoming increasingly doubtful, but it would be some time before the target of their kidnapping and who exactly they were became clear. Later that day, on the night of the 7th, the kidnappers greeted officials. from the harbor at Port Saeed as they sailed off the coast of Egypt.

Here they said they were members of the Palestine Liberation Front or a separatist militant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization or the PLO, the ruling body of Palestine during this conversation. the plf demanded that 50 palestinians imprisoned in israeli jails be released suddenly the kidnapping took on a more complex character it had now included israel in the mix this made negotiating a peaceful end to the incident more challenging it meant that the

italian

government now became much more passive in In his negotiations, Italian Prime Minister Betino Kraxi initially reasoned that because the kidnapper's demands were directed at Israel, Italy could not enter into negotiations with them but, more importantly, because foreign policy Italy had changed in the last decade to focus on improving relations with Mediterranean Arab states.

They were cautious not to cause tensions with their allies by being too tough on these kidnappers and appearing too friendly to Israel. Arab-Israeli tensions had recently spiked, just a week before Israeli forces bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunisia in retaliation. for the murder of three Israelis in In Cyprus, the bombing had killed 60 people and injured 100 more and had outraged Tunisia to such an extent that it had called a vote at the UN to condemn the attack in this delicate diplomatic environment what Italy What he wanted was a bloodless solution where tensions would not flare up and Italy could boast. of its intermediation capabilities and its diplomatic independence from the US.

Ideally this would mean a complete de-escalation without victims and without extraditions of the Middle East kidnappers, however, Italy still mobilized four helicopters transporting units of its Elite called the Muskin Battalion to the Akrotiri air base. in Cyprus in case it was impossible to end the crisis diplomatically. The Americans, on the other hand, had no qualms about using force, they had a zero tolerance policy for negotiating with

terrorists

and wanted them arrested and prosecuted, they saw an opportunity in the fact that the ship remained in international waters, which which made it susceptible to a military operation, so the United States decided to deploy joint forces of the Special Operations Command at the Sigonella air base in Sicily and planned an armed intervention for Wednesday night.

This answer detail included the famous SEAL Team Six, but back. Achilles' laurel On the morning of Tuesday, October 8, the kidnappers began to separate the hostages and confiscate their passports in one of the ship's rooms. They identified 12 American and six British hostages as valuable leverage, as well as a pair of elderly tourists from Austria. Two were questioned about their backgrounds and revealed that they were Jewish, prompting one of the gunmen to throw the husband to the ground and hit him with the butt of his gun. Of particular interest to the kidnappers was one passenger in the separated group, a wheelchair-bound Jewish American named Leon Klinghoffer, who, as he was immobile, was unable to accompany the hostages when they were told to move to the pool deck. on top of them and, as such, was forced to stay with one of the kidnappers his wife protested attempting. to convince them to let her take him upstairs, but they ordered her to leave him, it would be the last time she would see her husband around 11am. m., the ship finally reached the coast of Tartus in Syria, at which point the kidnappers demanded to be allowed. to dock at the port reiterating their demands that 50 prisoners be released to Israel and asking that British and American negotiators report to the ship if their requests were not met, they stated that they would begin executing hostages at 3 p.m.

Their requests to anchor at 3 pm. The Tardis port was not granted probably because the United States had embarked on a diplomatic campaign to ensure that states in the region did not grant the kidnappers safe haven by keeping them isolated in international waters in 232 approximately three and a half hours after their requests. initials. They greeted the port of Tartus with a sinister message: what about the negotiators? negotiators we will start killing at 3 pm we can't wait any longer we will start tickling what are the developments Tartus we will kill at the moment we are losing patience where the ship is heading Are you up for negotiations?

We warn you against further delay. Please navigate back to the position set for you. That's all. This message at 3 23 implies that one of the passengers had been executed between 258 and the time of his delivery. Rumors began to circulate in intelligence. In the United States it was circulating that an American passenger had been executed and indeed it was, around three o'clock, the leader of the kidnappers ordered one of the ship's waiters to help carry Leon Klinghoffer to the stern of the ship, to a isolated place, far from the rest of the hostages here, he fired the waiter and shot the American in a wheelchair twice, once in the chest and once in the face, killing him instantly.

Once he finished the execution, he called the ship's waiter and barber to throw him overboard. Klinghoffer's body would appear five days later on a beach in Syria, on October 13, where Syrian authorities would perform an autopsy. On the afternoon of the same day the kidnappers left the crime scene and headed to Cyprus while on Route The kidnappers received a radio communication from an Arabic language radio station in Cyprus called Monte Carlo. The transmission was from a man with the pseudonym Abu Khaled, who appeared to be the orchestrator of the kidnapping. He ordered the hijackers to turn the ship around and set course for the port of Saeed, adding that the hijackers were to treat the passengers well and maintain constant radio contact with the authorities at the Egyptian port in a separate radio broadcast later that night. as they approached Portside.

Khaled also ordered the hijackers to apologize for the seizure of the ship asking them to emphasize that it was not their original intention and that they would not do anything that would jeopardize the positive relations between Italy and Palestine. This is probably why they only attacked American, British and Jewish hostages as the kidnappers rushed to Port Said. Thus, American intelligence rushed to identify the mysterious Abu Khaled. The United States Bureau of Intelligence and Investigation established a tenuous connection between the pseudonym and the leader of the One plf faction, Muhammad Abbas, through a newspaper clipping indicating that Khaled was the name of his first-born son.

This somewhat rickety theory was later confirmed by Israeli intelligence contacts who said they had found this leftover Cave of Four and were 99 sure it belonged to Muhammad Abbas. Now, this was a problem for multiple reasons, the first was because, unbeknownst to foreign observers on Tuesday the 8th, Muhammad Abbas had been assaulted in Cairo when he was on his way to Tunisia by the Egyptian government. One account describes that at 10:30 a.m. the previous day, approximately nine hours after the kidnapping, the Italian Foreign Minister, Kyolo Andreotti, had contacted the Egyptian Foreign Minister. Boutrosgali requested that Palestinian diplomats participate in the mediation, so Gali attempted to contact de facto Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to request the diplomatic envoy, but was unable to contact him shortly after;

However, the Egyptian Secret Service informed him that a high-ranking member of the Palestinian National Council would soon pass through Cairo on his way to Tunisia; That high-ranking member was Muhammad Abbas, so when Abbas arrived in Cairo they took him off the plane, dragged him to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and dropped him in front of Italian and Egyptian diplomats as mediators in the kidnapping he had orchestrated was a clear conflict of interest and it was not long before all parties involved in the crisis learned their true role. The Italian geopolitical newspaper Limes noted that the kidnappers instinctively addressed him as Commander. after hearing his voice on the radio during negotiations, instantly alerting intelligence stations to his identity, so obviously that was a problem;

Secondly, the Revelation that the kidnapping was being led by a PLO loyalist made the situation much more delicate since the PLO was the only semi-respectable Authority in Palestine with whom one could negotiate whether Italy or the United States If the United States began to accuse it of terrorist activities, it would lose its only diplomatic bridge to Palestine. Knowing this, some American analysts began to advise against a military operation so that the Palestinians could save face and negotiate their way out of the conflict with the Egyptian government, a strategy that The Italians were already following to keep tensions down.

In any case, whether a military operation was to be carried out was no longer in their hands. At 7:15 in the morning of Wednesday the 9th, Aquililauro had entered Egyptian territory. Waters despite American protests and had entered into negotiations with Egyptian and Palestinian emissaries that made an American intervention in the next few hours impossible. Muhammad Abbas would be in the privileged position of mediating the de-escalation of a kidnapping that he himself had orchestrated and with this in mind. It is no surprise that negotiations moved so quickly at 1:30 p.m., just over six hours after negotiations began. Captain De Rosa of the aquililaur made the following statement via radio communications with Portside.I am the captain.

I speak from my office and my officers and they are all in good health that the guarantee that all the hostages had escaped unharmed was enough for the Italian and Egyptian governments to allow the kidnappers to go free in exchange for the release of the ship and its passengers , the American diplomat in Egypt, Nicholas Velietz, refused to approve these terms of release in the opinion that nothing less than a prosecution would be satisfactory, since only Italian and Egyptian pens were put on the paper without the two signatories knowing at the time, although DeRosa was fully aware that not all passengers were unharmed shortly thereafter. the day before the leader of the kidnapping squad Magid al-Walki had gone up to the bridge of the ship handing the passport to Rosa Klinghoffer and telling her that he had been eliminated, De Rosa also said later in a television interview that he was sure that Mulkey was telling the truth since he had bloody pants and shoes.

The only reason he had said everyone was fine was because they were pointing a gun at him during the conversation, but before anyone could figure out the ruse, the kidnappers had already disembarked and abandoned the ship, leaving around 3:30. They were escorted by Egyptian patrol boats to the port of Saeed, where they quickly disappeared into the Egyptian mainland, but it would take a little longer to clarify where he was in the meantime. It was increasingly obvious to the Italians that something was seriously wrong between 4:20 and 6:10 pm. Italian officials verified, through conversations with Captain DeRosa, that they had in fact been a casualty.

At 6:30, Prime Minister Betino Kraxy issued the announcement at a press conference shortly after contacting US President Ronald Reagan to inform him of Klinghoffer's death, the Italian diplomatic corps was left with egg on their faces a few hours before. that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giulio Andrioti, boasted about the capabilities of Italian diplomacy and announced the bloodless end of the conflict. The crisis was the fruit of an Italian foreign policy that not everyone always understands, on the contrary, now it seemed that they had just let four murderers go and were no longer sure where they were. America was furious the next day, Thursday, October 10.

Ambassador Valiots boarded the aquilaro to confirm the death personally. There he found Klinghoff's passport but there was no Klinghoffer. He called the US embassy and in an impassioned statement demanded that Egypt, quote, prosecute these sons of Egypt, had no intention of doing so, in fact, according to US and Israeli intelligence. he would reveal that they were facilitating their safe passage to Tunisia, where they would be picked up by Pillow's forces. This is despite the new developments of a US citizen being murdered at 6pm on October 10th. 26 and a half hours after disembarking, Aquililauro intelligence placed the kidnappers at Almaza Air Base in Egypt as they were preparing to board an Egypt Air flight out of the country.

Egyptian President Oznie Mubarak claimed that the hijackers had already left Egypt and he had no knowledge of where they were, so his internal intelligence was so pitifully pathetic that he had no idea the hijackers were boarding a civilian flight at an Egyptian military airport. or that he was lying. American analysts suspected the latter, but Mubarak or the hijackers did not know that as the flight was preparing to take off, a crisis management team had been developed in Washington. plans to intercept the plane around 7 p.m. Central European Time, an American carrier task group led by the USS Saratoga begins heading south from Greece at 8 15 four F-14 fighters two ka-60 tankers M2 e2c radar aircraft take off from the Saratoga and begin patrolling the airspace just north of the Egyptian coast when the Boeing 737 hijackers take off from Almaza at 10:00 p.m.

The task force monitors and surveils the plane around 11:30 the four F-14s finally intercept the 737 shortly after being denied landing rights in Tunisia, at this point the interception group radios the plane and demands that he follow them to NATO's Sigonella air base in Sicily. On board, the Egyptian crew attempts to establish radio contact with ground control in Egypt, but the radar planes accompanying the American task group are scrambling their signals without being able to request instructions from Cairo. The captain agrees to fly northwest to Sicily shortly after midnight at 12 10 a.m. m. On October 11, the plane lands at Sigonetta Air Base followed by two American troop transports.

The Italians were furious. They had been in the dark about the entire operation until just 40 minutes before the plane arrived at Sigonella. hidden the entire plan so that it would be impossible for them to refuse when they were forced to do so. Worse still, as an FBI agent later explained, the Italians were essentially forced to take jurisdictional responsibility for the hijackers; they felt that since the hijackers had committed crimes on an Italian ship and the plane had now landed on Italian soil , were required by law to process them in this way. This meant they couldn't allow the Americans to get hold of the hijackers, which had been the initial intention of the operation, but there are now about 80 American commandos crawling around an air base in Sicily, 50 of whom came from troop transports. who arrived together with the other contingent.

Being a Seal Team Six force that had moved back to Sicily from Gibraltar, they intended to take these

terrorists

back home and process them personally, so a diplomatic standoff arose in which both the United States and Italy they claimed jurisdiction over the kidnappers; However, there was also quite a bit of controversy. A literal confrontation also developed on the ground. The US Special Forces, who had been tasked with taking custody of the men, were now surrounded by about 50 Italian Air Force commandos and John Dance, who had orders to intervene with the Force if they tried to leave with them.

Reinforcements would soon put the Americans at a large numerical disadvantage of about 300 to 80. Sources vary on when exactly this standoff ended and when an agreement was reached, but it appears to have taken quite a while, it took four to five hours well into the The morning of October 11 before a call came from the White House ordering American troops to withdraw and let the Italians take custody of the kidnappers. An agreement had been reached between both the US Secretary of State and the Italian Foreign Minister. American troops would withdraw. If the Italians promised that the hijackers would be prosecuted aboard the 737, Italian troops would find the four hijackers and their entourage and, as a bonus, the hijacking orchestrator himself, Muhammad Abbas, the crisis would be over while there would still be trouble. between the United States and Italy. namely the refusal to extradite or even prevent mastermind Abbas from leaving the country due to what the Italians called citing a lack of evidence of his involvement the kidnappers would be tried and sentenced in the Italian courts the man who had killed Klinghoffer Magid al-mulki received 30 years, while his accomplices received more lenient sentences of 25 to 15 years.

Italy would later retract its conviction of Abbasa's innocence and try him in absentia, but he would never spend a day in an Italian prison after having found refuge in Iraq, the kidnappers always claimed that they had never intended to seize the ship, in rather than using it as a launching point for an attack on the Israeli port of Ashdod that was on the ship's travel itinerary. They claimed to have been discovered by the crew and had to improvise Italian courts and intelligence analysts. I doubt this story, but it's a bunch of worms that we unfortunately don't have time for.

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