ABBAS, MUHAMMAD

Muhammad “Abu” Abbas is the leader of the
Palestine Liberation Front–Abu Abbas Faction (PLF),
a Marxist militant group perhaps best known for
its hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985.
Abbas was a member of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) executive committee for many
years, remaining loyal to Yasir Arafat during the
1980s when many other militant Palestinian leaders
split with the PLO.
Abbas was born in 1948 in Haifa, in what is now
Israel. He has often told interviewers that he was just
13 days old when his family fled to a refugee camp
in Lebanon. He reportedly joined the PLO’s army
in 1964, and fought with the Vietcong against U.S.
forces in Vietnam.
Abbas joined Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC)
in the late 1960s. In 1977, he became alienated by the
pro-Syrian leanings of the PFLP-GC and left to form
the PLF. As a leader of the PLF, Abbas plotted several
unorthodox attacks on Israel. In 1981, PLF members
attempted to invade Israel by flying over the Lebanese
border in hang gliders and a hot air balloon; both
attempts were foiled by the Israeli military.
Abbas was deputy secretary of the PLF when
the group split into three factions: pro-Arafat and
his Palestine Liberation Organization, pro-Syrian,
and pro-Libyan. Abbas led the pro-PLO faction
and remained loyal to Arafat during the 1980s when
many others began to defect from the PLO leader’s
control.
Abbas became a member of the PLO executive
committee in 1984, and his close association with
Arafat and the PLO soon came under international
scrutiny. Four PLF members hijacked the Achille
Lauro on October 7, 1985, off Port Said, Egypt, as it
sailed toward Israel. Abbas’s men demanded the
release of 50 Palestinians held in Israel and threatened
to blow up the ship. They held hundreds of passengers
hostage for two days. During the ordeal, the
hijackers shot and killed an elderly Jewish man in a
wheelchair named Leon Klinghoffer and threw his
body overboard.
While the Achille Lauro was in the hands of the
hijackers, Abbas negotiated with Egyptian officials
and secured safe passage to Tunisia for himself, the
hijackers, and another PLF official in return for the
hostages’ release. An EgyptAir plane carrying the PLF
members took off for Tunisia, but U.S. Air Force
fighter jets forced the plane to land in Sicily, where
Italian forces arrested three of the hijackers. Abbas
and other PLF members, however, fled to the former
Yugoslavia with the help of Italian authorities,
provoking protests by the U.S. government.
Abbas has repeatedly claimed that the hijacking
was a mistake and that he had planned for his men to
travel undercover on the Achille Lauro until it docked
at Ashdod, Israel. The PLF subsequently moved its
base of operations to Iraq.
Abbas has never served time in jail, although an
Italian court tried him in absentia for his leadership
role in the Achille Lauro hijacking and sentenced him
to life in prison. The U.S. Department of Justice
dropped its international warrant for Abbas’s arrest
after the Italian conviction, saying that there was not
enough evidence to try him in a U.S. court.
Abbas left the PLO in 1991, after a foiled PLF raid
onto an Israeli beach created a diplomatic crisis
between the PLO and Washington. He did support the
Oslo Accords in 1993 and publicly supported the peace
process in 1996. He has announced that the PLF now
follows a political path.
In 1998, Israeli officials allowed Abbas to travel
through Israel to the Gaza Strip for a Palestinian
National Council meeting. At the meeting, he voted to
revoke the parts of the PLO’s charter that call for Israel’s
destruction and soon returned to establish himself and
the PLF in Gaza City. He reportedly now travels regularly
between Gaza and his old base in Baghdad.
The U.S. Department of State continues to consider
the PLF a terrorist group, and it included the organization
in its most recent report on global terrorism. In
November 2001, Israeli forces arrested at least 15 PLF
members and accused them of plotting bombing attacks.
See also ACHILLE LAURO HIJACKING; PALESTINE LIBERATION
FRONT–ABU ABBAS FACTION; PALESTINE LIBERATION
ORGANIZATION; POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION
OF PALESTINE–GENERAL COMMAND
Further Reading
Cockburn, Patrick. “Leader of Achille Lauro Hijack Turns
to the Ballot-Box.” The Independent (London), May 27,
1998.
Sennott, Charles M. “Achille Lauro Plotter Recast as
Proponent of Mideast Peace.” The Boston Globe, June
26, 1998, A1.
Smothers, Ronald. “Hostages and Hijackers: An Ally of
Arafat: Palestinian Guerrilla—Man of Many Factions.”
New York Times, October 13, 1985.
U.S. State Department. “Appendix B: Background
Information on Terrorist Groups.” Patterns of Global
Terrorism—2000. Released by the Office of the
Coordinator for Counterterrorism, April 30, 2001.
http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/2450.htm.