Says Terrorists Held Machine Gun to Her Head : Mrs. Klinghoffer Tells of Terror Aboard Ship

The widow of the wheelchair-bound American slain aboard the Achille Lauro said today that the Palestinian guerrillas who hijacked the Italian luxury liner put a machine gun to her head before separating her from her husband.

“I told them I couldn’t leave him and begged them to let me stay with him,” said a calm but watery-eyed Marilyn Klinghoffer, breaking her public silence at a Manhattan news conference.

The terrorists responded by putting a machine gun to her head, she said. “That was the last time I ever saw my husband.”

Shot in Back, Head

Her 69-year-old husband, Leon, was shot in the head and back. His body and wheelchair were flung into the Mediterranean.

Klinghoffer told reporters that the ordeal aboard the Achille Lauro began Oct. 7 when four gunmen burst into the dining room, kicking over tables and chairs and ordering the passengers to drop to the floor.

She said the men “herded us like cattle” into a corner of room.

“They kept their guns trained on us at all times” and pulled pins from grenades, she said.

The hijackers ordered the passengers to produce their passports and separated the Americans and the British from the group, ordering them to go to an upper deck, she said.

She said she tried to push her wheelchair-bound husband to the stairwell, but the hijackers stopped her.

Shots Fired

“Sometime during the long course of that brutal afternoon on deck, two shots were fired,” she said.

She said she did not think much of the shots at first because the terrorists had been firing their guns at ceilings and walls.

“How could it have occurred to me that it could have been my husband?” she asked.

Later, when she frantically inquired about him, the terrorists told her that he was ill and had been taken to the ship’s hospital, she said.

The truth became known when the terrorists were leaving the ship and she asked the captain what happened.

“It was then I learned the fate of my husband,” she said.