Crewman Quoted on Klinghoffer Death

An ex-hostage on the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro said Sunday that a member of the crew told him that he saw two terrorists shoot and kill Leon Klinghoffer, the only person killed during the hijacking, according to today’s editions of the New York Times.

Stanley C. Kubacki, a Pennsylvania criminal judge, said the ship’s chief bartender--the only reported witness to the slaying--had given Egyptian authorities a full account of the slaying Thursday morning. This was 12 hours before Egypt released the hijackers under a safe-passage agreement that ended the hijacking. Egyptian officials say they had not known of a slaying when the hijackers were released.

Kubacki also said he had no trouble picking out his former captors in Sicily, where the terrorists’ plane was forced to land by U.S. warplanes.

An Air Force jet bearing the freed hostages was diverted early Saturday to Sicily, where, Kubacki said, he was led to a tiny office at an Italian military base.

One by one, authorities led in the men Kubacki described as “the meanest, nastiest, cruelest people in the world,” and displayed them in separate lineups.

“There was disbelief in their eyes,” Kubacki said during a telephone interview from his Philadelphia home. He said the Palestinians apparently were stunned by seeing the Americans they had taunted at gunpoint just days before aboard the Achille Lauro.