Achille Lauro Hijackers Get 4-to-9-Year Terms : Sentenced on Minor Arms Charges; Prosecutor Says They Fought for Cause, Calls No Passengers

After a hasty trial marked by astonishing praise from their accusers, the hijackers of the Achille Lauro received preliminary sentences of four to nine years Monday on minor weapons charges, the least serious they face.

Genoa Prosecutor Luigi Carli surprised trial spectators by putting no passengers on the stand and presenting only witnesses who praised the hijackers of the luxury cruise liner for their “courage and firmness.” He also appeared to justify their terrorist actions in his own argument.

‘Fighting for a Cause’

“All things considered, (they were) fighting for a cause which, even if they used terrorism, cannot be considered without valid motivation,” Carli told a three-judge panel, summarizing his preliminary case against the hijackers on the charges of illegally importing and using arms.

Four of the hijackers are believed to have boarded the Achille Lauro in Genoa before seizing the ship last month off the coast of Egypt.

In pretrial confessions read to the court in Arabic before Carli presented his case, the self-acknowledged chief of the ship’s hijackers indirectly acknowledged that he murdered the elderly and invalid American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer--the only fatality during the three-day hijacking.

Monday’s court proceedings were hurriedly concluded in order to guarantee the continued detention of the five Palestinians while investigators prepare more serious charges of hijacking, kidnaping and murder against them. The proceedings required only eight nonstop hours of testimony and the deliberation.

One longtime Genoa court observer said the prosecutor may have used a relatively benign approach in this trial as a tactic intended, by its generosity, to win the continued cooperation of the five men in the more serious trial later.

When the sentences, most of them lighter than the prosecution had asked, were read aloud by Chief Judge Carlo Napoli, the five defendants raised arms and two-fingered victory salutes from behind the bars of their courtroom security cages and chanted, in Arabic, “In our souls, in our blood, we will defend Palestine,” a familiar slogan of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The five defendants--four young men accused of actually hijacking the ship and a fifth who was arrested in Genoa as an accomplice in getting their weapons and explosives aboard--sat quietly through most of the proceedings in three black-barred steel cages near the judges’ bench in a cavernous modern courtroom at Genoa’s Palace of Justice.

Ironically, the alleged accomplice who never boarded the Achille Lauro received the stiffest sentence--nine years--which Carli said he deserved because, unlike the others, he did not cooperate with Italian prosecutors.

After being cited under two aliases in earlier documents, he was identified as Issa Abbas, 24. He identified himself as a distant cousin of Abul Abbas, the PLO official whose escape from Italy, in the face of a U.S. arrest warrant charging him with masterminding the hijacking, caused a U.S.-Italian diplomatic crisis that almost brought down the government here.

The other defendants and their sentences on the weapons charges were: Youssef Molki, 23, of Jordan, the self-confessed leader of the hijacking, eight years; Ahmed Assadi, 23, of Damascus, Syria, four years; Ibrahim Abdellatif, 20, of Beirut, seven years, and Bassam Ashker, 19, of Tripoli, Lebanon, six years.

In his pretrial statement read to the court, Molki indirectly confessed to killing Klinghoffer. Discussing one of the Kalashnikov automatic weapons that the hijackers smuggled aboard the ship, he said, “I also used (it) for the worst crime of which I am accused”--the murder of the wheelchair-bound American.

Astonished Observers

Courtroom observers said they were astonished by Carli’s apparently deliberate decision to portray the defendants in a good light. Each of the witnesses Carli called to the stand--seven officers and members of the Achille Lauro crew and two policemen--seemed to outdo the next in praise of the men who held the ship captive.

Asked by the judges to identify the weapons from photographs, the crewmen gave qualified replies. But when asked how the hijackers behaved toward them and the passengers, some were fulsome in their praise.

One crewman testified that the hijackers “acted like patriots with courage and firmness,” and another appeared almost overwhelmed with gratitude because “they gave us water and bread.”

Another said one of the hijackers saved the life of an Austrian woman aboard the ship, prompting an audible comment from a courtroom spectator: “How, by not killing her?”

When reporters asked him after the trial why he justified the hijackers’ motivation in his summary, Carli dismissed the question by saying: “I don’t indulge in politics; it doesn’t interest me at all.”