Outburst by 2 Defendants Stalls Ship Hijacking Trial

The Achille Lauro hijacking trial adjourned abruptly today after two of the Palestinian defendants started yelling menacingly in Arabic across the courtroom.

Prosecutor Luigi Carli looked shaken and refused to say whether he or any other authorities in the case had been threatened. He hurried out of the courtroom.

The court interpreter was ordered not to translate the defendants’ shouts for reporters.

But it was clear that the two Palestinians’ shouts were directed in part at a fellow defendant, Ahmed Assadi, who has cooperated with prosecutors. Assadi and the two defendants who began shouting, Youssef Molki and Ibrahim Abdelatif, are charged with staging the hijacking.

Assadi, 24, had just testified that Molki wanted to kill the wife of Leon Klinghoffer, the American passenger who was shot to death during the October hijacking of the Italian cruise ship.

Molki is accused of killing Klinghoffer, 69, a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, and ordering the crew to dump his body overboard. On Thursday, however, Molki retracted a confession given prosecutors a month after the hijacking.

Assadi testified today that he embraced Klinghoffer’s wife, Marilyn, after he learned of the killing and told her, “I wasn’t involved.”

Abdelatif, 20, demanded that the court call a witness who, he claimed, would contradict the testimony just given by Assadi. The court allowed Abdelatif to question Assadi, but the exchange quickly led to an uproar.

Molki joined the shouting match and court guards moved in to restore order.

Earlier today, Abdelatif recanted a pretrial statement in which he said Molki admitted killing Klinghoffer, and said none of the hijackers killed the American.

Judge Lino Monteverde, who is conducting the trial of 15 defendants, read from a pretrial statement by Abdelatif that quoted him as saying: “Molki told me he killed an American but did not tell me why.”

“No, he didn’t say this,” Abdelatif told the judge today.

Monteverde quoted Abdelatif as saying: “We blocked Molki from killing Leon Klinghoffer’s wife.”

But Abdelatif insisted today that Molki had no such plan. “No one of us killed” Klinghoffer, he said.