U.S. Jets Force Plane Carrying Ship Hijackers to Fly to Sicily : Four Will Be Taken to Base in Germany

In a stunning turn of events in the skies over the Mediterranean before dawn today, U.S. warplanes intercepted an Egyptian plane carrying the four Palestinian terrorists who hijacked an Italian cruise liner and murdered an elderly American tourist, then forced the aircraft to fly to an American naval base in Sicily, a White House source said.

There, the terrorists were to be put aboard a U.S. military plane for transshipment to another U.S. base in West Germany.

Details of the interception were confirmed by the White House in Washington hours after Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi’s office announced that an Egyptian Air 737 carrying the four hijackers had landed at Sigonella airfield near Catania, Sicily at 12:30 a.m. (Italian time) today, accompanied by four U.S. military escort planes.

Craxi’s office described the stop at Sigonella, a U.S. Navy base established in Sicily after Libya expelled the U.S. military from its territory, as a “technical stop” before the U.S. aircraft proceeded to West Germany.

The prime minister’s office earlier had reported that President Reagan had asked the Italian government’s permission for the American and Egyptian aircraft to land.

There was no further explanation from Craxi’s office, which also declined to reveal to which U.S. airfield in West Germany the planes were destined.

The startling development followed a day of public recriminations between the United States and Egypt, which helped arrange the hijackers’ surrender Wednesday.

The whereabouts of the Palestinian hijackers, all members of the Palestine Liberation Front, a radical PLO group, had been a matter of much speculation and confusion since their surrender.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that Egypt allowed the hijackers to leave the country after they surrendered in exchange for safe passage out of the country. But he insisted that the decision was made before it became apparent that they had murdered Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a retired New York businessman, and thrown his body overboard.

Mubarak’s Statement

Mubarak told reporters that the four gunmen, who gave up after a 51-hour seige of terror aboard the liner Achille Lauro, had been turned over to the Palestine Liberation Organization. “Those who took charge of the hijackers are from the PLO,” he said. “They left Egypt already. I don’t know where they went but they possibly went to Tunis,” where the PLO maintains its headquarters.

In Tunis, Tunisia, however, Salah Khalaf, a PLO spokesman who is also known as Abu Iyad, denied that the organization had custody of the hijackers and said they would not be allowed to come to Tunis. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, who is in Senegal, said on American television that he believed the hijackers were “under the Egyptian authorities’ control.”

The United States made no effort throughout Thursday to hide its anger at Egypt.

President Reagan, saying he was “mad,” demanded that the four Palestinian pirates be turned over to authorities for prosecution “as the murderers that they are. . . . We think that no responsible nation should give shelter to these people (but) should make them available to whichever country has proper jurisdiction for prosecution.”

An irate Reagan Administration official charged that as of late afternoon Thursday, the hijackers were still waiting at Al Maza Airport outside Cairo and Egyptian officials were preparing to fly them to an unknown destination.

“We’re angry at the Egyptians and we want that flight stopped,” said the official, who spoke in Washington on the condition that he not be identified. Later, however, a White House spokesman said the hijackers had left Egyptian airspace, but said he did not have any information on their destination.

Italy, which would presumably have jurisdiction because the murder was committed on a ship carrying its flag, had demanded early Thursday that the PLO turn over the hijackers and started formal extradition proceedings. The government also disclosed that a joint U.S.-Italian rescue mission had been planned before the crisis was resolved; it apparently would have involved slipping commandos aboard the hijacked ship from minisubmarines.

The Mubarak government was clearly embarrassed by the swift condemnation it received for not keeping the hijackers in custody until it had been clearly established that the 511 hostages aboard the ship were safe.

‘Easy to Pass Judgment’

At a hastily called news conference here, Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid defended Egypt’s handling of the surrender. “It is easy to pass judgment now when the situation has been defused,” he said. “It is unfair to speak now in this manner after all our efforts.”

The incident has clearly created a severe strain in relations between Washington and Cairo, which receives about $2 billion in U.S. aid annually.

The four hijackers, who took command of the Achille Lauro after it left the Egyptian port of Alexandria Monday afternoon, surrendered late Wednesday and left the ship in a tugboat. They were brought to the Port Said Naval Station several hours before the Egyptian government ordered the ocean liner ashore so that it could be inspected for explosives and Klinghoffer’s murder could be investigated.

Both Mubarak and his foreign minister insisted Thursday that the government had relied on information provided by the captain of the ship, Gerardo de Rosa, when it decided to go ahead with the release of the gunmen.

Meguid produced a tape recording of a ship-to-shore telephone conversation in which the captain was quoted as saying that “my officers and everybody are in good health.”

Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, however, announced shortly after the surrender that the hijackers had killed Klinghoffer. He said he had received word of the death from De Rosa, who learned Tuesday from a terrorist in bloody clothing that the hijackers had shot Klinghoffer, then pushed him and his wheelchair overboard.

‘Hijackers Had Left’

“When we accepted the hijackers’ surrender, we did not have this information,” Mubarak said Thursday. “This information emerged five hours after the surrender. In the meantime, the hijackers had left the country.”

Later Thursday, Mubarak appeared to question the murder report. “Now it has been said there was a murdered man,” the Egyptian president was quoted as having told the government-run Middle East news agency. “There is no body and no proof he had been murdered. . . . Maybe the man was in hiding or did not board the ship at all.”

But the remarks were interpreted here as more a defensive expression of anger than a serious declaration that the murder never took place.

Meguid told the news conference that Egypt’s primary concern Wednesday was for the safety of the hostage passengers and crew.

“If we had any information that something was going wrong on the ship, we would have never, never pursued the operation,” he said. He noted that Egypt had become involved in negotiations with the terrorists only at the request of the Italian and West German governments, which had many citizens aboard the ship.

“We agreed to cooperate reluctantly,” the foreign minister said.

American anger with the Egyptians became apparent when Independent News Network broadcast the contents of a ship-to-shore telephone conversation between U.S. Ambassador Nicholas A. Veliotes, who was on the ship as it came into Port Said harbor after the surrender, and his embassy in Cairo.

‘Insist They Prosecute’

“Tell the foreign minister,” Veliotes was quoted as saying, “that we insist they prosecute these sons of bitches.”

In remarks to reporters later Thursday, Veliotes acknowledged that when the Egyptians agreed to the Palestinians’ surrender terms, they “did not know an American or anyone had been murdered. They were told everyone was fine.”

Nevertheless, Veliotes hinted strongly at displeasure with the Egyptian decision, saying, “Our position is that these are murderers. There should be as full investigation, and they should be prosecuted according to the laws of Egypt, like any criminals,” for both murder and kidnaping.

The Achille Lauro remained tied up in the harbor at Port Said on the northern end of the Suez Canal. The Italian owners of the ship had not decided whether to allow the cruise to continue to its next port of call in Ashdod, Israel, or to return to Italy.

There was no explanation for why the ship’s captain had radioed that everyone was safe on Wednesday afternoon, though it was possible he was forced to by the gunmen.

Marilyn Klinghoffer, 58, who had been traveling with her husband, left the ship with 10 other Americans to board a bus for Cairo and a flight home. She earlier had come ashore briefly in Port Said to call her daughters in New York and tell them, “Your father was a hero.”

The hijacking of the ship was condemned by most of the Arab states in the region as well as by the PLO.

Anonymous Caller

An anonymous telephone caller in Beirut said the hijacking was carried out by a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front which is close to Arafat.

The caller said the guerrillas intended to attack an Israeli military target after reaching the point of Ashdod in retaliation for the Israeli bombing raid against PLO headquarters in Tunis on Oct. 1. But the caller said that the plans were changed when ships’ officers discovered their weapons.

The hijackers were described as belonging to a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front which is headed by Abul Abbas, a nom de guerre for a man named Mohammed Abbas Zaidan.

Zaidan is a close friend of Arafat’s and was elected to a seat on the executive committee of the PLO at the Palestine National Council meeting in Amman Jordan last year.

Egyptian authorities identified the four hijackers as Alaa Abdullah Kheshen, 19; Majid Youssef Malaki, 23; Mahmoud Ali Abdullah, 23; and Abdel Latif Ibrahim Fatayer, 20. All were described as students.