Egypt Violated Pact on Hostages, U.S. Aides Say

Egypt was legally bound to try the Palestinian hijackers of the liner Achille Lauro or extradite them to Italy under an international treaty that bans the taking of hostages, U.S. officials say.

State Department officials said late last week that they pressed the point privately with the Egyptians to no avail and that Washington’s failure to make the case publicly has drawn diplomatic criticism.

The treaty, which was introduced in the United Nations by West Germany, officially went into effect in 1983 when it was ratified by 22 nations. Egypt ratified the pact on Oct. 2, 1981. It states that if an offender enters the territory of a signatory, that country “shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged . . . to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”

Since the Achille Lauro hijackers were allowed to leave Cairo in an EgyptAir jet that was later intercepted by U.S. warplanes and forced to land in Sicily, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has defended his release of the four on the grounds that, at the time, he was unaware that an American hostage had been murdered aboard the cruise ship. However, a homicide is not required for the treaty to go into effect.

“We might not have had to divert the Egyptian plane and Mubarak could have avoided a lot of domestic flak if he had accepted his treaty obligation,” a State Department official said.

Under the treaty, the only proper course Mubarak could have taken was to have arrested the four for trial in Egypt or turned them over to another government with legal jurisdiction, such as Italy, which owns the hijacked ship, said Hal Collums of the State Department’s treaty office.

However, Collums said that Italy, which made no move to detain Palestine Liberation Front official Abul Abbas, who was aboard the EgyptAir plane with the Palestinian hijackers and is accused by the United States of masterminding the Achille Lauro operation, was not legally bound to hold him because Rome has signed the treaty but not yet ratified it.

On the other hand, Yugoslavia, which also rejected U.S. pleas for Abbas after he arrived in Belgrade from Italy, ratified the treaty last April 18. Yugoslavia said that Abbas had diplomatic immunity, but the treaty makes no exceptions in requiring trial or extradition for people involved in the attempted or successful taking of hostages.

Why neither the White House nor the State Department moved quickly to call attention to obligations under the treaty remains unclear. One White House aide speculated that U.S. officials involved in the crisis were unaware of the details of the pact.

Some foreign diplomats here criticized the U.S. handling of the matter because they said it opened Washington to charges by Mubarak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat of “official hijacking” by the U.S. Navy jets that intercepted the plane carrying the Palestinians.