Posted on 04/18/2003 2:20:57 AM PDT by kattracks
Don't send Abu Abbas back to Italy. They had their chance at him. And they blinked. I know. I was there.It was late Thursday, Oct. 10, 1985. For three days, Abbas, leader of a breakaway PLO group called the Palestinian Liberation Front, had held hostage an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, carrying more than 400 passengers. Among them was a 69-year-old New York tourist in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer. In the course of the hijacking, Klinghoffer was shot and went over the side of the ship to his death.
But that Thursday, the hostage siege was over. An EgyptAir Boeing 707 with Abbas and his crew of terrorists was on its way across the Mediterranean when the plane was intercepted by U.S. fighter jets and forced to land in Sicily.
The saga, it would seem, was coming to an appropriate end - the perpetrators in Italy in the hands of the country whose ocean liner had been hijacked and whose citizens had been held hostage.
But not so fast. The Italians had another agenda. They were scared. Terrorist violence had begun to erupt across Europe. In neighboring France, bombs were going off randomly in restaurants, parking lots and street trash cans.
The Italian government clearly feared Italy could be next.
U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Rabb told the Italians that the Reagan administration wanted Abbas back. It never happened.
As the State Department put it at the time: "The government of Italy has informed us that its judicial authorities did not consider this evidence legally strong enough to support the provisional arrest of Abbas while awaiting a formal U.S. request for his extradition."
So they let him him go.
But the Italians' culpability goes much further. They didn't just blithely take off the handcuffs and show him the front door. They protected him. Squads of heavily armed Italian troops held at bay the 50 U.S. Marines who had been ordered to seize Abbas at the airport in Sicily when he landed.
When he left, he had gotten a chic blue safari suit, and in plain daylight boarded a flight for Belgrade. Yugoslavia's Tanjug news agency already was praising Abbas for negotiating an end to the hijacking and avoiding "a greater tragedy."
That's when I caught up with Abbas. On his arrival at Belgrade, he was whisked off in the car of the ambassador of the Palestine Liberation Organization to his residence. In Tunis, as a CBS News correspondent, I negotiated with PLO leader Yasser Arafat for an interview with Abbas.
Finally, it came through: the hoarse whisper of the terrorist leader on a scratchy phone line, denying his role in the violence of the hijacking - Abbas saying all he wanted was to put this incident behind him and be left alone to resume his life in the Middle East.
He got his way. Yugoslavia ignored an Interpol warrant for Abbas' arrest, and a few days later he was back in Syria, and from there it was only a short hop to Iraq, whose passport he had carried throughout. He has been there ever since.
The Italian government fell a couple of weeks later, after word got out about its perfidy and cowardice. Later, with the heat off, another Italian regime tried Abbas in absentia and sentenced him to life. Few thought they'd ever have to make good on it.
On Tuesday, U.S. forces finally got their hands on Abbas in Iraq. And now the Italians want him back? Basta!
Andelman is business editor of the Daily News.
E-mail:dandelman@edit.nydailynews.com
Originally published on April 18, 2003
Some talking head was saying that we couldn't do that because there was no "law on the books" at the time for what he did.
I'm not sure I understand that since I would think we have had laws against the murder of a US citizen anywhere for a long, long time.
Anyway, I rather see him disappear where we can get all the info we need out of him and then send him back to Italy, one piece at a time.
I would go further. Italy can have his rotting corpse after he has been executed.
Like the wars against the Barbary pirates and the war of 1812.
Yeah..that's kinda what I thought.
But...but...he "sounded" so professional.
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