Good-Conduct Pass for Terrorists?

The 1985 terrorist hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean was memorable not least because it involved the coldblooded execution of an American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, as he sat helplessly in his wheelchair. Retribution of a sort soon followed. U.S. warplanes forced an Egyptian jet carrying the hijackers to safety to land in Sicily. Italian authorities allowed the terrorists’ leader, Mohammed Abbas, boss of a hard-line faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to get away. But four other hijackers were sent to prison for up to 30 years. Today only one of them is still incarcerated. The other three, taking advantage of an astonishing laxity in prison rules, have simply faded away.

The latest to vanish is Youssef Magied Molqi, Klinghoffer’s convicted killer. As in the earlier cases of two other hijackers, he was given a pass from prison as a reward for good behavior. Like the others, he took advantage of that freedom to escape.

The U.S.government, says a spokesman for the embassy in Rome, is interested in knowing “what a convicted terrorist was doing out on a good-conduct pass.” It’s a reasonable question that all Americans would like to see answered. Italy has close economic ties to Libya--a notorious haven for hijackers and bombers--and some other Arab states. It also has a history of pussyfooting with Palestinian terrorism. Allowing Molqi to escape can only be taken as further evidence of this shamefully accommodating behavior.