October 7, 1985: The Italian cruise ship MS Achille Lauro is hijacked by 4 members of the Palestine Liberation Front, as she was sailing from Alexandria to Port Said, Egypt, a stopover on its way from its home port of Naples, Italy to Ashdod, Israel.
Holding the passengers and crew hostage, they directed the vessel to sail to Tartus, Syria, and demanded the release of 50 Palestinians then in Israeli prisons. After being refused permission to dock at Tartus, the hijackers killed 69-year-old disabled Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, and then threw his body overboard. He turned out to be the only person who died in the story.
The ship then headed back towards Port Said, and after two days of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the liner in exchange for safe conduct, and were flown towards Tunisia aboard an Egyptian commercial airliner. This plane, however, was intercepted by U.S. fighter aircraft and directed to land in Sicily, where the hijackers were arrested and later tried for murder. All 4 were imprisoned, but all lived long enough to be released
* Ahmad Marrouf al-Assadi, 22 years old at the time of the hijacking, disappeared in 1991 while on parole. In 1994, Spanish authorities believed him to be in their country.
* Bassam al-Asker, 16, was granted parole in 1991. He was last heard from in 2007, in Lebanon, training Palestinian militiamen to fight the U.S. Army alongside Iraqi rebels.
* Ibrahim Fatayer Abdelatif, 19, served 20 years. On July 7, 2008, he was expelled from an illegal immigrant detention center in Rome. He has not been heard from since.
* Youssef Majed al-Molqi, 22, convicted of killing Leon Klinghoffer. He was sentenced to 30 years. He left the Rebibbia prison in Rome on February 16, 1996, on a 12-day furlough, and fled to Spain, where he was recaptured and extradited back to Italy. On April 29, 2009, Italian officials released him from prison early, for good behavior, and then deported to Syria. That's the most recently the West has heard about any of the hijackers.
The ship was stricken by bad luck throughout its history. It was launched in 1947, as the Dutch passenger liner MS Willem Ruys. It had a collison in 1953. In 1965, it was bought by Achille Lauro, a Mayor of Naples, and a member of Italy's national legislature, the Chamber of Deputies. He was an opportunist, a fascist in the Mussolini years and a social democrat afterward. He named the ship for himself, but before he could complete its renovation, there was an onboard explosion. Lauro died in 1982, before the hijacking. A fire off the coast of Somalia finally sank the ship in 1994.
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October 7, 1985 was a Monday. Baseball player Evan Longoria was born. This was the day after Major League Baseball's regular season ended, and the Playoffs had not yet begun. Therefore, the only score on this history day was on ABC Monday Night Football: The Washington Redskins beat the football version of the St. Louis Cardinals, 27-10 at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington.
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