Italian Cruise Ship Hijacked Off Egypt by Palestinians : Terrorists Demand Israel Release Prisoners; 400 People Are on Liner

ROME —  A group of armed Palestinians hijacked an Italian cruise ship with more than 400 people aboard--most of them crew members--off the Egyptian coast Monday, demanded the release of prisoners held by Israel and threatened to blow up the ship if attacked.

Egyptian authorities notified Italy that the ship was seized by the Palestinians after it left Alexandria en route to the Suez Canal city of Port Said. They said the ship, the liner Achille Lauro, then steamed away from Port Said into the Mediterranean.

Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman Francesco Verga said early today that the ship was reported to be heading north, about 40 miles from Port Said.

As of early today, Egyptian port officials said they had received some radio communications from the hijackers.

PLO Denies Responsibility

Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti called the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Rome and was told that the PLO has no knowledge of the hijacking and denied responsibility for it, the spokesman said. A spokesman at the PLO’s Tunis headquarters said, “There is no connection between the PLO and this operation.”

According to news agency reports from Port Said, the hijackers identified themselves as members of a group called the Palestine Liberation Front and were led by a man named Omar.

The reports said the commandos, carrying firearms and explosives, have demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners in Israel and threatened to blow up the cruise liner if their demands are not met or if the ship comes under attack.

Israeli short-wave radio monitor Mickey Gourdus told Israel radio that the hijackers have threatened to execute some of the passengers, beginning with the Americans on board, unless Egyptian TV agrees to broadcast their demands.

Patrizia Terese, a duty officer at the Foreign Ministry, told the Associated Press that 72 Americans were among 600 passengers who left the ship in Alexandria for a daylong tour on shore and were to have reboarded the ship at Port Said after sightseeing. But when the passengers arrived in Port Said, they were placed on buses and taken back to Cairo, 138 miles southwest of the canal city, and checked into hotels.

Some of the American passengers who left the ship land told the ABC News program “Nightline” that there still are Americans on board, wire services reported.

Harriet Hauser, of Hollywood, Fla., said in Cairo, “I have two friends that stayed on ship because they had been here before.” Another passenger, Matthew Polito of New Jersey, also said he knew of Americans still aboard the ship.

An Egyptian security official told United Press International that the seven-man commando team threatened to kill the hostages, one by one, but had set no deadline. Other Egyptian officials said they believe the leader is Omar Mustafa and that the group he heads is opposed to PLO chief Yasser Arafat.

Arab specialists said that the Palestine Liberation Front is close to two other radical groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

There were conflicting reports concerning the number of passengers and crew members aboard at the time of the hijacking. Officials of Flotta Achille, the shipping company that owns the Achille Lauro, could not be reached to give the names and nationalities of passengers and crew.

But a Naples Port Authority spokesman said that when the ship left Italy, there were 840 passengers aboard including West Germans, Italians, Britons, French, Spaniards and Americans.

The Italian Foreign Ministry said that 70 to 80 passengers and 340 crew members were aboard the ship when it was hijacked.

In Constant Contact

Andreotti spent most of Monday night and early today closeted with Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and Defense Minister Giovanni Spadolini, all of whom were said to be in constant contact with Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid. The spokesman said that both Italian and Egyptian military aircraft would fly reconnaissance missions over the hijacked cruise liner at first light today.

Spadolini placed the Italian armed forces on alert late Monday.

The Italian news agency ANSA said that the first signal heard from the ship was an SOS intercepted by a ham radio operator in Goteborg, Sweden, as the Palestinians seized the ship Monday morning.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Egyptian authorities told Andreotti that the hijackers have demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

“We don’t know which organization these people belong to or which prisoners they want freed,” said the spokesman.

No immediate reaction was reported from Israel, where government authorities in the past have consistently said they would not deal with terrorists.

One Name Mentioned

In Egypt, there were reports that the hijackers have specifically demanded the release of an imprisoned Palestinian named Samir Konaitery, responsible for a guerrilla attack in the late 1970s at Nahariya in northern Israel.

Konaitery was one of four men responsible for the 1979 hostage incident in Nahariya in which an Israeli man and his 5-year-old daughter were murdered. Two of the four terrorists were killed in a subsequent shootout with Israeli troops on the Nahariya beach. Konaitery and another man were captured, but the other man was freed last May 20 as part of a prisoner exchange with Palestinian radicals.

The 50 Palestinian prisoners whose release was demanded may include those people who have been captured since April on three boats seized by the Israeli navy. Some of the 50 are believed to be members of the elite Force 17 commando unit of the PLO. On Aug. 30, Israeli navy gunboats captured a yacht carrying 20 members of Force 17, a unit originally organized by Arafat to guard him personally. In two earlier incidents, the Israelis took 16 other Palestinian guerrillas into custody.

Italian Foreign Ministry sources said they would be surprised if Arafat or people under his control had anything to do with the hijacking, because Italy’s relations with the Palestinian group are among the best in Europe.

They noted that both Craxi and Andreotti strongly condemned Israel’s bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunisia last week, and Andreotti even compared the raid to Nazi atrocities in Italy during World War II. Andreotti also was instrumental in arranging Arafat’s private audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 1983.

The luxury cruise liner embarked on what was to have been an 11-day cruise from Genoa on Oct. 3, with stops scheduled at Naples, Syracuse (Sicily), Alexandria, Port Said, Ashdod (Israel), Cyprus, and the island of Rhodes before returning to Genoa on Oct. 14, according to the Naples Port Authority.

The 23,269-ton liner, which was built in 1947, was named after the late Neapolitan shipping magnate who lost his fleet in a financial crash two years ago.

Times staff writer Dan Fisher, in Jerusalem, contributed to this story.