PLO Aide Tries to Implicate Klinghoffer’s Wife in His Death

A top aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said Wednesday there is no proof that Leon Klinghoffer was killed by the terrorist hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and that his wife may have pushed him overboard to collect insurance money.

“Nobody ever had the evidence he was killed . . . that Palestinians were terrorists,” Farouk Kaddoumi said in halting English at an Arab League luncheon attended by the U.N. secretary general and the president of the General Assembly.

“Perhaps, (it) might be his wife pushed him over into the sea to have the insurance,” said Kaddoumi, chief foreign policy spokesman for Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

Three Palestinians hijacked the Italian cruise ship on Oct. 7 off the Egyptian coast and held hundreds of passengers and crew members hostage for three days. Witnesses have said the hijackers shot Klinghoffer, 69, and partially paralyzed, and forced crew members to throw the New York man’s body overboard in his wheelchair. An autopsy performed in Italy confirmed that Klinghoffer was shot to death.

Kaddoumi contrasted the attention in the United States on the death of Klinghoffer with the killing of 68 Palestinians and Tunisians in the Oct. 1 Israeli air attack on the PLO headquarters in Tunis.

“One was killed and the campaign is spread over the world that the Palestinians are terrorist,” said Kaddoumi, who has denounced the air raid as an act of “state terrorism” by Israel.

Kaddoumi said he was not defending the hijacking, however, and noted that Arafat sent a message of condolence to the Klinghoffer family.

Neither Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar nor General Assembly President Jaime de Pinies commented publicly on Kaddoumi’s remarks. At the luncheon, both expressed their friendship with Arabs. The secretary general said the PLO “must contribute” to a lasting settlement in the Middle East.

Other U.N. officials, speaking privately, expressed embarrassment. One said Kaddoumi’s remarks were a “cause of horror.”

Israeli Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu, who learned of Kaddoumi’s remarks just before his speech in the assembly debate, departed from his text to denounce Kaddoumi’s suggestion as an “outrageous” lie.

Klinghoffer’s widow, Marilyn, of New York City, and members of her family have filed a $1.5-billion-dollar suit against the PLO, alleging “wanton and cold-blooded murder.”