Italians Free PLO Official Sought By U.S. in Hijacking : Suspect Named as Mastermind

A top official of the Palestine Liberation Organization wanted in the the United States for masterminding the hijacking of an Italian cruise liner left Italy on Saturday night, escaping an American arrest warrant that would have forced Italian authorities to jail him pending a formal request for extradition.

Abul Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front with which the hijackers of the Achille Lauro identified themselves and a key aide of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, flew from Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport to Belgrade on a Yugoslav airliner.

The sequence of events strongly indicated that the wanted Palestinian’s flight was aided by Italian authorities.

U.S. officials in Washington say that they have evidence that Abbas “planned and controlled” the operation that resulted in the hijacking.

U.S. Envoy Displeased

U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Rabb, referring to the escape of the PLO leader, left the office of Prime Minister Bettino Craxi on Saturday night saying, “I’m not happy about what has happened here today. The most important thing for us and the entire world is the battle against terrorism.”

During a stopover of his flight at Dubrovnik Airport on Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast, Abbas accused U.S. authorities of conducting “state terrorism” with its interception of the EgyptAir 737 and arrest of the four hijackers, Reuters news agency reported.

“The American government’s act of state terrorism gives us the right and encouragement to use all means in our liberation struggle,” Abbas said. He vowed that his group would battle to free the four Palestinians.

The agency reported that Abbas, a tall, burly figure wearing a dark blue safari suit, was traveling under an Iraqi diplomatic passport in another name.

U.S. Warrant Issued

Abbas’s departure from Rome came after the Justice Department announced in Washington that a warrant had been issued for his arrest on charges of piracy, hostage-taking and conspiracy to commit both crimes.

It was unclear whether the U.S. warrant, including a request for Abbas’s provisional arrest pending a formal petition for extradition, was officially delivered to Italian authorities in time for them to act on it before the PLO official’s apparently hasty departure, but a U.S. Embassy spokesman said that the documentation arrived from Washington “early on” in the day Saturday, “well before” the Yugoslav plane took off.

An hour after Abbas’s 7:10 p.m. (Rome time) departure, a spokesman at the Italian Foreign Ministry said that he knew of the warrant and request for arrest only from news reports and that he had seen nothing to show that the request was delivered in Rome before the Yugoslav aircraft took off.

Jetliner Was Delayed

The regularly scheduled, Belgrade-bound jetliner had been unexplainably delayed for one hour and 50 minutes at the airport before two men, said to have been issued tickets in Arabic names, boarded the aircraft. There was speculation that Italian authorities had held the flight so that the two men could board it.

Abbas and the other, unidentified PLO official were aboard the EgyptAir Boeing 737 carrying the four Palestinian hijackers away from Egypt to apparent freedom when it was forced to land early Friday in Sicily by U.S. Navy F-14 fighters from the carrier Saratoga, part of the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean. Held for questioning by magistrates in Sicily, the pair flew to Rome along with other passengers in the EgyptAir plane Friday night and were questioned again by a Rome prosecutor Saturday.

Prosecutors in Sicily had said that there was no reason to detain Abbas and his companion.

On Saturday evening, at about 6:15, the EgyptAir jet, which had been parked at the military-civilian airport of Ciampino on the southern edge of Rome, suddenly took off and landed 17 minutes later at nearby Leonardo da Vinci International Airport. Two men disembarked and hurriedly boarded the Yugoslav airliner that had been waiting long beyond its scheduled departure time.

Suspicious Circumstances

There was no immediate explanation of the sequence of events from Italian authorities, but there was speculation that Abbas’ flight from Italy, even under suspicious circumstances suggesting official collusion, was less embarrassing to the Craxi government than would have been his arrest and subsequent extradition to the United States.

Craxi has had perhaps the warmest relations of any European leader with Arafat, and it was to the PLO chieftain that he first turned for help after the cruise liner Achille Lauro was hijacked on Monday. Arafat disclaimed responsibility for the hijacking and sent Abbas and another senior aide to Cairo to help in the negotiations for the release of the ship.

When the terrorists surrendered Wednesday, the Italian prime minister publicly thanked Arafat, at the same time that he revealed for the first time that the hijackers had murdered the wheelchair-bound American, Leon Klinghoffer, during the operation.

In the fast-paced aftermath of the hijacking, Craxi has been criticized both for cooperating with the United States in the capture of the Egyptian airliner on which the hijackers were flying away from Egypt in search of asylum and for calling on Arafat for help in the first place.

Newspapers Critical

Left-wing newspapers derided the U.S. interception of the airplane as a “Rambo” operation, referring to the current film, by President Reagan and criticized Craxi for assisting it by allowing to land on Italian territory. The leftist Il Manifesto warned Italians not to applaud “the American pirates who dress up as policemen of the world.”

Some of Craxi’s own government coalition partners, particularly Defense Minister Giovanni Spadolini, took him to task, claiming that he was becoming too cozy with the PLO.

“Italy is the country most exposed in the fight against terrorism,” Spadolini wrote in a letter to the editor of La Republica, a liberal Rome daily. “Yet Italy is the PLO’s most friendly country.”

He scoffed that Arafat had accomplished “too little, in my judgment, for the public thanks which were given to him (by Craxi.)”

Formal Charges Filed

The four young men accused in the ship hijacking, meanwhile, were imprisoned and formally charged with hijacking, kidnaping and the premeditated murder of Klinghoffer.

They were taken from the U.S. Navy-Italian military base at Sigonella, where they had been in judicial custody since their EgyptAir flight was forced to land, to a heavily guarded jail, once a convent, in Syracuse, south of the base. Ironically, Syracuse is the ancient Sicilian port celebrated in Greek myth as the place where the sword of Damocles was suspended by a thread, becoming the historic symbol of high anxiety.

The four reportedly told the magistrates from Syracuse and Genoa who are interrogating them that their original intention aboard the Achille Lauro was to go as far as Ashdod, Israel, to run a terrorist operation there.

But when a ship’s waiter unwittingly entered their cabin and saw them cleaning their weapons, they seized him and made a spot decision to hijack the ship, according to the reports.

Because the four apparently used false or stolen passports to board the cruise ship in Genoa, investigating magistrates said that their identities had not yet been legally determined. They were initially identified by Egyptian authorities as Alaa Abdullah Kheshen, 19; Majid Youssef Malaki, 23; Mahmoud Ali Abdullah, 23, and Abdel Latif Ibrahim Fatayer, 20. All were described as students.

Identified by Passengers

Whatever their true identities, the four were identified as the hijackers by four American passengers from the ill-fated cruise ship, including the widow of Leon Klinghoffer, who were flown to Sicily from Cairo en route home to the United States in order to confront them.

Nothing was revealed concerning the questioning of Abbas and the other PLO representative before their departure for Belgrade. They were visited by deputy state prosecutor Franco Ionta, who had previously been immersed in an investigation of the assassination of retired American diplomat Leaman R. Hunt, killed by Arab terrorists outside of his Rome home in February, 1984. Hunt was director general of the multinational peacekeeping force in the Sinai Peninsula at the time of his death.

There was no indication that the Hunt assassination had any bearing on Ionta’s questioning of Abbas on Saturday.

It was somewhat ironic that Abbas made his comments on a stopover in Dubrovnik where the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga, which launched the F-14 interceptors, docked on Friday.

Abbas claimed that the U.S. jets fired warning shots at the EgyptAir plane:

“(The U.S. jets) fired warning shots and missiles on both sides of our plane. They appeared determined to shoot the plane down. What could we do?”

In reconstructing the interception of the EgyptAir jetliner, U.S. officials have stated firmly that no shots were fired at the aircraft.