Cruise Lines in U.S. Looking for Ways to Tighten Security

While Italian authorities investigated reports of lax security aboard the hijacked liner Achille Lauro, cruise lines representatives in the United States said Wednesday that they are reassessing their own security measures in light of the incident.

“Every cruise line in the industry will immediately begin looking at their security procedures,” said George Cruys of San Francisco, a spokesman for the Royal Viking Line, a division of Norwegian Caribbean Lines, which Cruys said is the largest passenger shipping firm in the world. “We’ve just updated our security measures, and we’re going to look at them again.”

According to the industry representatives, speaking in telephone interviews, security on passenger liners is not controlled by government regulations but is left to the individual liners. It varies from ship to ship and from port to port.

Less Stringent

Precautionary measures are admittedly less stringent than those that were imposed on the airline industry more than a decade ago as a result of an increasing number of airplane hijackings.

Like other industry representatives, Cruys maintained that liners are generally less vulnerable to hijackings because the large numbers of passengers and crew members on board make it more difficult for a few terrorists to establish and maintain control.

However, Cruys added: “It would be crazy (for the industry) not to treat this incident seriously and establish new procedures.”

James Godsman of the Cruise Line International Assn., which represents most cruise lines in the United States, said its members are “going to be talking about increased measures.”

But Godsman, in New York, said he expects no drastic changes. He said most lines traveling to the Mediterranean increased security last summer, after Shia Muslim extremists hijacked a TWA airliner shortly after takeoff from Athens.

Over the last decade, Godsman said, cruise lines have provided additional security officers at ports and on board and have tightened access to ships.

Farewell Parties Rarer

“Most don’t have farewell parties anymore,” he said. “People aren’t allowed to visit ships as in the past.”

Most companies depend on airport security and random inspections by customs officials for checking baggage of passengers who join ships overseas after landing at airports there, said Cruys of the Royal Viking Line.

In the United States, customs and immigration officers control the disembarking of passengers and cargo but have no jurisdiction over security measures on the ships, according to spokesmen for the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The ships do not generally use metal-detecting devices to check boarding passengers.

As a result of the Achille Lauro hijacking, Princess Cruises, which has four ships that sail out of Los Angeles, has already begun increasing security at its home port as well as in Naples, Italy, its embarkation point in the Mediterranean, spokesman Max Hall said.

“We are increasing our security personnel dockside and are adding security equipment, such as metal detectors and X-ray equipment,” he said. “We’ll also have trained sniffing dogs” to try to detect the presence of explosives, he added.