Mohammed Abul Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship in which an American tourist was killed, has died in U.S. custody in Iraq, Palestinian and U.S. officials said Tuesday. He was 56.
Abbas' small Palestine Liberation Front commandeered the Italian cruise ship, demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and threw an elderly wheelchair-bound Jewish American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard after shooting him.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that Abbas died Monday, "apparently ... of natural causes." He said there would be an autopsy.
[...]
Abbas was captured in southern Baghdad by U.S. forces in a raid in April, and lived the last 11 months of his life in American custody.
Abbas's death was initially announced by officials in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's office here.
[...]
When Abbas was captured last spring, the Palestinian Authority demanded his release, saying the United States had pledged not to prosecute him as part of a blanket agreement not to press charges against Palestinians who acted against Israel before interim peace accords were signed in the 1990s.
[We're talking the Oslo Accords here, I assume, and of course, the U.S. and Israel have held up their part of the bargain, while the Paleos most definitely have not. Yet still they behave as if nothing's wrong with holding us to the letter of the "law." What hypocrites, liars and killers.--Jen]
[...]
After Klinghoffer was killed, the other passengers were released after a two-day ordeal and the commandos surrendered to Egyptian authorities, who put them on a flight to PLO headquarters in Tunisia.
U.S. Navy fighters forced the flight down in Sicily.
[I must insert a cheer for our Navy here! Yea!--Jen]
The Italians, to the Americans' dismay, allowed Abbas to flee to Yugoslavia before a U.S. warrant for piracy and hostage-taking could be served.
Abbas disappeared, and international manhunts and a price on his head failed to flush him out. He next turned up in Gaza after granted amnesty by the Israelis.
While out of the limelight for the past decade, Abbas is believed to have continued plying the terror trade from Iraq until his April capture.
Israeli intelligence officials say the PLF faction under Abbas was a conduit for Saddam Hussein's payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
[And yet the Left keeps telling us that Saddam's Iraq had no ties to other Islamist terrorism...--J.T.]
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 was born in 1948 in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria after his family fled from their home in Tira, near Haifa, when the state of Israel was created.
He attended Damascus University and graduated with a degree in Arab literature. He also became involved in student politics and in 1967 joined George Habash's Marxist/ Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
He fought as a guerrilla, as often against rival Palestinian factions as the Israelis. But Abbas and others felt that group was focusing too much on political philosophy rather than armed struggle.
What a horrible man--check out his picture if you want to see someone who has dead "shark" eyes.
I'm certain that our military didn't torture or abuse him while he was in custody, which is a real shame, because his death from natural causes was much kinder than poor Leon Klinghoffer's and better than he deserved, but because he didn't meet death through the "glorious martyrdom" of blowing himself up while killing Jews, he won't get those 72 virgins (or is it raisins?) after all.
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