"Abu Abbas Captured after Two Hours of Fighting"

PLF Leader Captured in Baghdad

News article

Date: April 16, 2003

Source: The Associated Press.

About the Author: The Associated Press is an international newswire service with regional offices and staff reporters positioned throughout the world.

INTRODUCTION

In October 1985, the Italian passenger ship Achille Lauro, carrying 680 passengers and 350 crew, was on a twelve-day cruise in the Mediterranean Sea. On Monday, October 7, the ship docked at Alexandria, Egypt, where most of the passengers disembarked for a sightseeing tour. Sixty to eighty people were still aboard when four armed Palestinian terrorists seized control of the ship to begin a fifty-two-hour hostage crisis. The terrorists sent a radio message in which they identified themselves as members of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF). They threatened to kill hostages if Israel did not release fifty Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Authorities in Italy, Israel, Egypt, and the United States were initially uncertain precisely which group the terrorists represented. PLF was a name loosely applied to a number of breakaway factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat. Some of these factions opposed Arafat's leadership, but the Achille Lauro terrorists were members of a pro-Arafat faction led by Abul (or Abu) Abbas, also known as Mohammad Abbas or by his birth name, Mohammad Zaidan, who masterminded the hijacking of the cruise ship and directed it via radio. U.S. officials were outraged when they learned that the terrorists had shot Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish man from New York, and dumped his body, along with his wheelchair, overboard.

The Achille Lauro hijacking touched off a complex diplomatic situation. The terrorists, in the gunsights of at least three nations, surrendered to the Egyptian authorities in exchange for safe passage. The Egyptians then released them to the Palestinians and put them aboard an EgyptAir flight bound for Tunisia, the headquarters of Abbas's PLF faction. U.S. F-14 fighter jets, however, forced the plane down at a NATO base in Sicily, and after considerable diplomatic wrangling, it was agreed that the Italians would hold the hijackers, but that the United States would seek extradition.

Meanwhile, Abbas remained on the plane, claiming diplomatic immunity. The Italian government led by Prime Minister Bettino Craxi concluded that it had no legal grounds to detain Abbas because he held an Iraqi diplomatic passport and the plane was on a diplomatic mission, and Abbas was put on a plane and flown to Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s, he continued operating out of Tunisia but, under diplomatic pressure from Italy and the United States, Tunisia expelled him. In about 1994, he fled to Baghdad, Iraq, where he was given safe haven by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Abbas remained a wanted man in both the United States and Italy for nearly two decades until April 14, 2003, when U.S. Special Forces of the 3rd Infantry Division in Operation Iraqi Freedom captured him in a compound in southern Baghdad. The following news article details the events surrounding his capture.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Baghdad, Iraq—Helicopters roared over at 4:30 a.m., and a few minutes later an explosion shattered the windows of the Faoud family home. For the next two hours, gunfire rattled around their one-story house; a desperate man tried to find haven by smashing his way inside. When it was over, American troops had grabbed one of the world's most wanted men, Abul Abbas, mastermind of the 1985 cruise ship hijacking during which 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer was slain.

For the Faouds, the arrest was a revelation: No one knew the man down the street was anything more than an Arab volunteer fighting coalition forces, they said. "I didn't know who Abul Abbas was," said Ghada Butti, mother of the Faoud house. "I have never heard of him before."

On Wednesday, she and other neighbors provided a detailed account of the firefight Tuesday morning that led to the capture of the head of the Palestine Liberation Front.

The family was asleep when the helicopters swooped in at a low altitude, awakening everyone. Minutes later, the Faouds jumped from their beds, shocked by a window-shattering explosion, followed by two more blasts.

Abul Abbas was apparently hiding in one of the houses in alley No. 6 at al-Hurriya Square. Gunfire continued for more that two hours as Abul Abbas and his followers scurried around trying to escape the U.S. raiders.

Butti recalled hearing somebody in the garden of her home trying to break through a window in her children's room. Minutes later, someone pounded hysterically at the house's main door. "I wanted to open the door with my husband, Khaled, but before we did so I asked in English, 'Who's there?'" she recounted, saying she expected American troops to answer. " Khaled then opened the door for a few seconds, then closed it when he did not find anyone outside."

Neighborhood residents said they believed Abul Abbas was caught after taking refuge in an abandoned house. The house, which had no ceiling, was once an inn but was sold few years ago, one man said.

After Khaled Faoud closed the door, loudspeakers boomed out a message in Arabic: "Caution, caution, caution. Abul Abbas, surrender. Coalition special forces have surrounded the area. Follow the instructions and move forward toward the voice. Raise your hands up and walk slowly. We will not harm you. Think about your family."

The message, played repeatedly, terrified Butti. " I was afraid they might have thought we were his family, and they were about to storm our house," she said.

A little more than two hours after the helicopters came, American soldiers stormed the family's garden gate and approached the main door. Screaming "help, help," Butti let them inside.

The soldiers told the family not to worry, but asked them to leave the house as they searched every room. Her husband and two male neighbors were taken for "two hours of interrogation," Butti said. More than 24 hours later, none had returned.

At the house next door, Zareh Krekorian was one of those taken away with Faoud. Krekorian's wife, Hermenah, took a reporter from room to room, showing smashed windows and broken locks left by the Americans' search. The main door was so badly damaged that she had to summon workers to build a wall to keep thieves out.

Butti's eldest daughter, Hind, told of seeing a bloodied body wearing an olive green uniform, dangling from the wall of their backyard. She did not know if it was an American or one of Abul Abbas' men.

U.S. soldiers also came around showing a picture of Abul Abbas and asking neighbors if they had seen him, Butti said. She did not recognize him. Another announcement in Arabic followed, with the promise of a reward for information about Abul Abbas.

Later, an American came and gave Butti and her children a box filled with 12 meals. "I don't want food," she said she told the soldier. "I want my husband back." American troops stayed in the area for about three hours after the shooting stopped, she said.

Butti, who lives a few hundred yards from the heavily bombed Air Force Command, said the raid was the most frightening part of the war for her. "We did not feel at all that we will stay alive," she said, standing next to her 2-year-old son Faysal. "We surrendered to death that day . . . After we survived all these wars we were about to die in the battle of Abul Abbas."

SIGNIFICANCE

Abbas, who was born on December 10, 1948, joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command in 1968. In 1977, when disagreements over policy led to rifts between the PFLP, the PLO, and other Palestinian factions, Abbas created the PLF. In turn, the PLF fragmented into various factions, but Abbas remained loyal to Yasser Arafat and, appointed to the PLO executive council in 1984, received support from the PLO. Throughout the 1980s the PLF planned and executed terrorist attacks primarily against Israeli civilians. In 1990, for example, Abbas planned an aborted speedboat attack on Israeli swimmers at a beach near Tel Aviv.

He was convicted in absentia in Italy and sentenced to five life terms for his role in the Achille Lauro hijacking.

In the 1990s, Abbas appeared to have undergone a kind of conversion. He claimed to support peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine, and the Israelis even gave him diplomatic immunity because he was apparently participating in the peace process. He also issued a statement about the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, saying that the shooting was a "mistake" and that the entire Achille Lauro incident was an operation that had gone sour. Nonetheless, he appeared on Iraqi television in 2001 to praise Saddam Hussein for inciting anti-Israeli sentiment in the Arab world.

U.S. officials regarded the capture of Abbas as a major victory in the war on terrorism. Abbas, however, was never brought to justice. On March 8, 2004, he died of an apparent heart condition while in American custody.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Bohn, Michael K. The "Achille Lauro" Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism. Dulles, Va.: Brassey's, 2004.

Web sites

BBC News. "A Hijack on the High Seas," 2002. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A730900> (accessed July 10, 2005).

CNN.com. Ensor, David. "U.S. Captures Mastermind of Achille Lauro Hijacking." CNN.com, April 16, 2003. <http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/15/sprj.irq.abbas.arrested/index.html> (accessed July 10, 2005).