Members of Congress are calling on both Yasser Arafat and Israeli authorities to arrest and extradite to the United States the mastermind of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking.
Mohammed Abbas, known as Abul Abbas, was in Gaza this week as the Palestine National Council voted to amend its charter.
Israel had allowed Abbas and other known terrorists safe passage to Gaza for the PNC meeting to enable the Palestinians to change parts of the charter calling for the destruction of Israel.
The PNC voted 504-54 on Wednesday to amend portions of its charter calling for the destruction of Israel. Palestinian officials said they would write a new covenant within six months.
An Italian court convicted Abbas in absentia of the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew aboard the cruise ship.
“The killing of American citizens by known terrorists cannot go unpunished,” Rep. Mike Forbes (R-N.Y.) said at a Manhattan news conference Tuesday. “Abul Abbas has escaped prosecution long enough and now must be brought to justice.”
Forbes, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D- Brooklyn) and the Zionist Organization of America joined in calling on the Clinton administration to work with Israeli authorities to apprehend Abbas and bring him to trial in the United States.
“Israel has a moral obligation to either prosecute Abbas or surrender him to another nation so that he may be brought to justice, and the United States certainly must send the message that the hijacking and killing of American citizens will not go unpunished,” Hikind said.
After the hijacking, the United States issued a warrant and offered a $250,000 bounty for Abbas’ arrest. The Justice Department lifted the warrant in 1988 after his conviction in Italian court, saying that it was not “critically important” to have a conviction in the United States.
A spokesman at the Justice Department said this week that the United States would not request Abbas’ extradition.
In Gaza this week, Abbas told the Washington Post that Klinghoffer “was not killed because he was an American or Jew. He was killed because he made a lot of fuss.”
Abbas said, however, the death was “a mistake, and we do not support it.”
Klinghoffer’s murder aboard the Achille Lauro set off an international uproar that culminated with U.S. fighters forcing an Egyptian plane carrying Abbas to land in Italy.
The Italian government, however, prevented U.S. military personnel from capturing Abbas, ignored a U.S. extradition request and sent him to safety in Yugoslavia.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
