Arafat was backed by the Soviet Union and was helped to escape Lebanon by the president's brother, Rifaat al-Assad, and his "Red Knights" of Alawite notables near the Lebanese border with Syria.

[citation needed] Achille Lauro embarked from Genoa, Italy, on 3 October 1985, with an itinerary for an eleven-day cruise which included ports of call in Alexandria in Egypt and Ashdod in Israel.

[4] The TWA incident had even impacted the Mediterranean cruise business: Greece's Epirotiki Line took three of its ships – Jupiter, Jason, and Neptune – out of service when terrorism fears led to decreased travel demand overall in the region.

[4][6] Passengers who had stayed aboard the Achille Lauro, such as Rene Sprecher, would later report watching a camera crew record what appeared to be people running on and off the ship firing guns with blanks.

The Terrorist Incident Working Group (which included National Security Council staff member U.S. Marine Corps LtCol Oliver North) met in accord with predetermined counter-terrorist procedures.

Prime Minister Bettino Craxi looked for a diplomatic solution beginning a near-continuous dialogue with every country involved, including the nations with citizens aboard, and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Tunisia.

Arafat sent two men to Egypt to join a joint negotiating team alongside Italians and Egyptians – one of his advisors and PLO executive committee member Hani al-Hassan and Abu Abbas.

At this point it became clear to the hostages and Captain De Rosa that one of the four hijackers was their leader – twenty-three year-old Youssef Majed Molqi (recruited by Abbas from a crowded Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan).

Additionally Klinghoffer was Jewish and American, and his wheelchair made him both hard to move around the ship and meant his extended absence from the main group was less likely to trigger a chain reaction of resistance among the surviving hostages.

Before Achille Lauro could head towards Libya, Abbas, unable to contact the ship using Egyptian Naval communications, called into Cyprus' Arabic language station Radio Monte Carlo.

At the next stop, national security affairs adviser Robert "Bud" McFarlane told the press that Reagan "meant that he wants the PLO to turn these hijackers over to competent authority for trial."

Minutes later, and less than an hour after his initial comments, Reagan held another question-and-answer session with the press, saying "I really believe that the PLO, if the hijackers are in their custody, should turn them over to a sovereign state that would have jurisdiction and could prosecute them as the murderers they are."

James R. Stark realized that due to ongoing disputes that Egypt had with Libya and Chad that the plane would most likely fly over the Mediterranean sea which raised the option of intercepting it with U.S. Navy fighters.

Stark recalled that during World War II, American fighters had acted on intelligence to intercept Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and advocated a similar action (with a forced landing rather than shooting the aircraft down).

Reagan, speaking with employees of Chicago's Sara Lee bakery, was informed of the option along with potential problems (such as finding the correct EgyptAir jet and possibly damaging relations with Egypt and Italy).

[4] A desire for successful assertive action against terrorism in the Reagan administration was further spurred by the memory of the political cost borne by President Jimmy Carter for a lack of the same (his inability to free American hostages seized by student demonstrators in Iran was held to have been a major factor in his failed 1980 reelection bid).

[4] On October 10, 1985, the four hijackers boarded an EgyptAir Boeing 737 accompanied by Abu Abbas, Ozzuddin Badrakkan (also called Mohammed Oza – he served as chief of PLF military operations and was a PLO official), and several members of Egypt's counterterrorism unit Force 777.

It had just finished participating in a NATO exercise and was headed for Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, when late in the evening it received the orders from commander of the Sixth Fleet, Vice Admiral Frank Kelso, and reversed course along with the rest of its group.

[7] Minutes after the 737 touched down, two United States Air Force C-141 cargo planes landed with counter terrorist members of SEAL Team Six who quickly surrounded the airplane at the airstrip as it came to a halt.

Craxi appeared at a press conference late on Friday, October 11, acknowledging the role the two played in ending the hijacking, but inviting them to provide "useful testimony" and turning the matter over to the Italian court system.

[12] National Security Council staffer Michael K. Bohn in the White House Situation Room at the time, later recalled "Pilots on board the U.S. and Italian jets exchanged colorful epithets over the radio about their respective intentions, family heritage, and sexual preferences.

Craxi later announced that the Justice Ministry held that the U.S. request did not "satisfy the factual and substantive requirements laid down by Italian law", so there was no legal basis to hold him any longer as he was on board an aircraft that had extraterritorial status.

Arafat was able to contact Craxi warning him that "uncontrollable actions could result" if Abbas was turned over to the U.S.[4] In support of the American position was Defense Minister Spadolini along with the provincial magistrate who had authorized the jailing of the four hijackers.

[26] According to Abraham Sofaer, a State Department legal adviser, before the plane carrying Abbas to Yugoslavia even touched down, the Reagan Administration gave Yugoslav authorities the intelligence information it had passed onto the Italian government, along with "the transcripts and the hard evidence that we have accumulated in the 24 or 48 hours since then.

[30] There became a concern in the U.S. that Mubarak believed that he had been publicly humiliated by the U.S. and would move toward reconciliation with other Arab states at the cost of relations with Israel and the U.S., which was seen as being detrimental to Middle East peace efforts and perhaps even another Arab-Israeli war.

The Reagan administration sent a diplomatic envoy led by Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead to Egypt for a "thorough and friendly discussion" telling Mubarak that they hoped to "put our recent differences behind us.

[27] The Administration announced that they would be convening a Federal grand jury to consider an indictment against the four hijackers and Abu Abbas who was believed to have fled to South Yemen (a pro-Soviet Arab nation with no diplomatic relations to the U.S.).

[4] While Youssef Majed Molqi (the hijacker who had shot Klinghoffer) received one of the longest sentences of the group, the court cited the conditions of his childhood growing up surrounded by violence in a Palestinian refugee camp as a mitigating circumstance.

[46] Throughout the 1990s, Abbas moved back and forth from Baghdad to the West Bank, secretly recruiting more Palestinians to join the PLF, while he told the news media that he was reformed and that the Achille Lauro hijacking had been an accident.

[4] Speaking to the New York Times in 2002 Abbas denounced Osama bin Laden and sought to distance the Palestinian cause from Al Qaeda's declared holy war against the United States.