By JUSTIN HUGGLER in Jerusalem
The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, the American murdered in his wheelchair during the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro 18 years ago, yesterday demanded that Abu Abbas, the Palestinian militant captured by American soldiers in Baghdad, finally face trial before a US court for the
killing of their father.
Italy joined the clamour to bring Mr Abbas - his real name is Mohammed Abbas - to justice, saying it would demand his extradition on a long-standing arrest warrant for the hijacking.
The murder of Klinghoffer has come back to haunt Mr Abbas.
The particularly gruesome details - the Palestinian militants who hijacked the ship shot the crippled 69-year-old before the eyes of his wife, who was herself dying of cancer at the time, and flung his body, wheelchair and all, into the sea - had a resonance that has not faded after all these years.
The composer John Adams even wrote an opera about the killing, The Death of Klinghoffer, that attracted its own share of controversy.
Jewish groups picketed performances in the US.
That opera has just been turned into a film that premiered, by a strange twist of fate, earlier this year.
But, despite the US military's attempts yesterday to portray the capture of Abu Abbas as a big catch - it was, said Captain Frank Thorp, a US spokesman, proof of "the nexus between [the Iraqi] regime and terrorism" -- he is a small fish.
The US dropped a warrant for his arrest several years ago.
Were it not for the atrocity on board the Achille Lauro, few people would have heard of him at all.
The hijacking took place in 1985.
Hundreds of passengers were held hostage on the Italian cruise liner by militants from Mr Abbas' Palestine Liberation Front after they took control of it off the coast of Egypt.
Only Mr Klinghoffer was killed, and the reasons he was shot have never been fully clear, although it has been suggested it was because he was Jewish.
Mr Abbas never set foot on the ship, but planned the hijacking.
He has repeatedly claimed - most recently in an interview with the New York Times in Baghdad last November - that it was never part of the plan to kill any of the passengers, or even hold them hostage, and that something went wrong.
His plan, he claimed, was to use the ship to get militants into Israel.
However, he was convicted in absentia by an Italian court for hijacking the ship.
Despite an outstanding Italian arrest warrant, he is not so elusive as his American captors suggested.
For four years, before the outbreak of the current Intifada in 2000, he was living much of the time openly in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli authorities gave him permission to enter and leave Gaza through Israel several times.
They even allowed him to travel inside Israel, to visit his birthplace - his family were refugees from the creation of Israel in 1948.
That was all after an Israeli security commission found that he had renounced violence.
The Israeli Supreme Court even ruled him immune from prosecution for the Achille Lauro hijacking, under the Oslo peace accords.
He fled back to Iraq - he enjoyed good relations with Saddam Hussein -- a few weeks before the current Intifada began in 2000, after the peace process collapsed.
One intriguing thing about his capture is that unidentified associates of his in Lebanon were quoted yesterday as saying that Mr Abbas twice tried to escape Iraq through Syrai but was twice refused entry by Syrian border guards.
Senior US officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, have repeatedly accused Syria of allowing members of Saddam Hussein's regime to flee through its border.
The Palestinian Authority was yesterday demanding his release under the same accords, which were signed by the US as well as Israel and the Palestinians, and which say no PLO official can be tried for violent acts committed before 1993.
The US said yesterday the accords do not apply in a third country.
Doubtless lawyers will argue over this in the coming months.
Apart from the Achille Lauro hijacking, Mr Abbas' PLF did little in the way of militant attacks.
It specialised in far-fetched plans - often the stuff of Hollywood fantasy -- to smuggle militants into Israel in hot-air balloons or rubber boats, which almost always went wrong.
In the best-known fiasco, in 1990 17 PLF militants tried to attack Israeli beaches by coming in on hang-gliders.
They were all intercepted by the Israeli military before they could do anything.
If Mr Abbas renounced violence after the Oslo accords, there have been claims from unnamed Israeli security sources - unsubstantiated so far -- that several PLF militants were captured trying to get into Israel to attack Ben Gurion airport last summer, and that the group was behind the killing of an Israeli teenager in 2001.
Mr Abbas now faces a bleak future.
A life sentence awaits him if the US grants Italy's extradition request.
If, as seemed more likely yesterday, the US decides to try him itself, he could face the death sentence.
- - INDEPENDENT
By JUSTIN HUGGLER in Jerusalem
The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, the American murdered in his wheelchair during the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro 18 years ago, yesterday demanded that Abu Abbas, the Palestinian militant captured by American soldiers in Baghdad, finally face trial before a US court for the
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