From the nice folks at FoxNews - couldn't have happened to a nicer guy...
| Mostly the same article as yesterday, but with a few more words. We'll use it for his obit. |
Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship in which an American tourist was killed, has died in U.S. custody in Iraq, Palestinian and U.S. officials said Tuesday. He was 56.
Don?t know what the Islamic equivalent of hell is... but welcome to it, Bub.
| And say hello to Himmler for us, okay? Mind the heat, now! |
Abbas' small Palestine Liberation Front commandeered the Italian cruise ship, demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and threw an elderly wheelchair-bound Jewish American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard after shooting him.
...Setting the pattern for Paleostinian bravery to come.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that Abbas died Monday, "apparently ... of natural causes." He said there would be an autopsy.
...Part of me would love to think that somebody visited him at his cell last night and expressed President Bush's sympathies over the heart attack Abu was going to have in the morning...
Whitman declined to answer further questions, including whether Abbas still was being interrogated in the period before his death. Abbas, whose given name was Mohammed Abbas, was captured in southern Baghdad by U.S. forces in a raid in April, and lived the last 11 months of his life in American custody. Abbas's death was initially announced by officials in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's office here. No cause of death was given either by the Palestinians or the Americans.
| I'm still hoping they put "drowning, after gunshot" on the death cert... |
When Abbas was captured last spring, the Palestinian Authority demanded his release, saying the United States had pledged not to prosecute him as part of a blanket agreement not to press charges against Palestinians who acted against Israel before interim peace accords were signed in the 1990s.
| We told 'em to piss off. He was a bad boy in a war zone, nabbed at a terr training center. Since he was "captured," that means he wasn't "standing on the sidewalk throwing flowers at the liberators." What'd they think we were gonna do with him? |
The United States also endorsed a 1995 interim peace deal which grants PLO members immunity for violent acts committed before September 1993, when the two sides signed a mutual recognition agreement.
| Fact remains, he was a terr commander, nabbed in a training camp. Too bad, so sad. Thfffft! |
Abbas had been a marginal figure in the PLO of late. He was a member of the PLO's executive committee, but left in 1991. His tiny faction has very few followers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to Israel's Shin Bet security service, the PLF had sent some members to Iraq for military training. In April 1996, Abbas visited Gaza for the first time, as part of the amnesty offered by Israel. While in Gaza apologized for the killing of Klinghoffer. In 1998, he returned to attend a session of the Palestine National Council, the Palestinians' parliament-in-exile, for a crucial vote on abrogating chapters of the PLO founding charter calling for Israel's destruction. In the end, Abbas did not participate in the vote.
| Too drunk to make it, was he? Or he couldn't abide the thought of acknowledging the existence of the Zionists? |
At that time, Israeli attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein said Abbas did not pose a threat to Israeli security, and that it would be unreasonable to prosecute him for acts committed before 1993.
| Klinghoffer being risen from his watery grave and restored to the pink of health and all... |
U.S. commandos caught Abbas last April during a raid on the southern outskirts of Baghdad.
| There was an earlier story, before they caught him, that he'd tried to get into Syria and been turned back... |
Klinghoffer?s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, said that Abbas' death deprived them of the right to hold him legally accountable. "Our hopes were raised last year, when he was captured in Iraq by U.S. troops and arrested," the daughters, who live in New York, said in a statement. "Now, with his death, justice will be denied. The one consolation for us is that Abu Abbas died in captivity, not as a free man."
| I'd like to think it was from falling down the stairs one too many times. But he was a fairly porky fellow, somewhere in the three chin range — guess he was fond of the good life when he wasn't shooting people. We prob'ly fed him too much and exercised him too little, so his arteries clogged up. Either that, or it was a hot day and Sgt. Swivelhips showed up for his interrogation session wearing only her tee-shirt so he had a stroke. |
Abbas had been convicted in absentia in an Italian court for the 1985 hijacking and sentenced to life in prison in 1986, but never served any time. His arrest came 18 years after seizing the Achille Lauro off Port Said, Egypt. After Klinghoffer was killed, the other passengers were released after a two-day ordeal and the commandos surrendered to Egyptian authorities, who put them on a flight to PLO headquarters in Tunisia. U.S. Navy fighters forced the flight down in Sicily. The Italians, to the Americans? dismay, allowed Abbas to flee to Yugoslavia before a U.S. warrant for piracy and hostage-taking could be served.
...According to intel afterwards, ol' Abu just about s**t himself when he saw three F-14s suddenly turn their lights on around that 737, and went into eye-rolling spittle mode - threatening to kill the pilots if they didn't try and escape. Amazing how bad these guys get when faced with trained men with guns.
Abbas disappeared, and international manhunts and a price on his head failed to flush him out. He next turned up in Gaza after granted amnesty by the Israelis.
| "Da heat's off, Abu! Youse can come out now!" |
While out of the limelight for the past decade, Abbas is believed to have continued plying the terror trade from Iraq until his April capture. Israeli intelligence officials say the PLF faction under Abbas was a conduit for Saddam Hussein?s payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Israel reported earlier this year that it captured several Palestinians who trained at a PLF camp in Iraq and were told by Abbas to attack an Israeli airport and other targets.
| Just couldn't put it down and walk away. |
Abbas was born in 1948 in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria after his family fled from their home in Tira, near Haifa, when the state of Israel was created. He attended Damascus University and graduated with a degree in Arab literature. He also became involved in student politics and in 1967 joined George Habash's Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He fought as a guerrilla, as often against rival Palestinian factions as the Israelis.
But Abbas and others felt that group was focusing too much on political philosophy rather than armed struggle. In 1976, Abbas took his followers to form a new faction, the Palestine Liberation Front. |