Hijack leader freed; America outraged

Press, 14 October 1985, Page 6

Hijack leader freed; America outraged

NZPA-Reuter Belgrade The Palestinian leader, Abu Abbas, whose arrest is sought by Washington over the Achille Lauro hijacking, arrived in Yugoslavia yesterday and accused the United States authorities of conducting “State terrorism.”

Abbas, head of the Palestine Liberation Front, members of which hijacked the Italian cruise ship, landed in Belgrade on a scheduled Yugoslav Airlines flight from Rome.

United States Navy jets intercepted the Egyptian plane carrying the ship’s four Palestinian hijackers on Friday. A tall, burly figure wearing a dark blue safari suit, Abbas spoke at Dubrovnik airport, on Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast, during a stop on his way to Belgrade. The Italian Government let him go at the week-end. The United States Government said yesterday that it would seek to extradite Abbas from Yugoslavia or anywhere else he went. The United States had

issued an arrest warrant for Abbas and asked Italy to detain him until a formal extradition request was processed.

In Rome Italian officials said that the United States Ambassador, Mr Maxwell Rabb, had protested in a “hard and sharp tone” against Abbas’s release. The Eyyptian President, Mr Hosni Mubarak, accused the United States of piracy yesterday for forcing the Egypt Air airliner to land in Italy and said that the incident has caused coolness and strain in United StatesEgyptian relations. He called the interception “unheard-of under any international law or code. I am very wounded.” He said that he had thought to himself after the Boeing 737’s pilot reported he had been intercepted by unidentified fighters,” Which country would commit an act of piracy in this way?” “I would never have imagined it to be a friendly country. I was shocked when I heard it was the United States. We had not expected this attack from a friend,” he said.

Students shouting slogans against the United States and Israel clashed with riot police trying to contain a demonstration at Cairo University. The police used bamboo staves and fired tear-gas to break up the protest by more than 3000 students.

Yelling “Palestine is Arab,” the students demanded . that Egypt scrap its United States-sponsored Camp David agreements and 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which made it the only Arab State with relations with the Jewish State. A Left-wing Opposition party handed out leaflets demanding that ’ Cairo’s special relationship with the United States be revised. Egypt is one of Washington’s main Arab allies and biggest recipient, after Israel, of United States military and economic aid. The liner is still docked at Port Said.

Egyptian authorities were not expected to let it leave until the Egypt Air Boeing, now in Rome, returned to Egypt. Nearly all the liner’s 80 hijacked passengers have flown home.