Daughters of 'Achille Lauro' victim demand US trial for Abu Abbas

The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, the American murdered in his wheelchair during the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro 18 years ago, demanded yesterday that Abu Abbas, the Palestinian militant captured by American soldiers in Baghdad, face trial in the US for the killing of their father.

Italy joined the clamour to bring Abu Abbas to justice, saying it would demand his extradition on a long-standing arrest warrant for the hijacking.

The murder of Klinghoffer has come back to haunt Abu Abbas. The Palestinian militants who hijacked the ship shot dead the disabled 69-year-old in front of his wife, who was dying of cancer, and flung him into the sea. The composer John Adams wrote an opera about the killing, The Death of Klinghoffer, whose performances were picketed by Jewish groups in the US. The opera was turned into a film, which had its première this year.

Despite attempts by the US military to portray his capture on Tuesday as a "big catch" – Captain Frank Thorp, a US spokesman, said it was proof of "the nexus between [the Iraqi] regime and terrorism" – Abu Abbas is a small fish. The US dropped a warrant for his arrest years ago.

Were it not for the atrocity on the Achille Lauro, few people would have heard of him. Militants from Abu Abbas's Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) held hundreds of passengers hostage after they took control of the cruise liner off the coast of Egypt in 1985. Only Klinghoffer was killed, possibly because he was Jewish.

Abu Abbas was not on the ship, but planned the hijacking. He has repeatedly claimed – most recently in an interview with The New York Times in Baghdad in November last year – that it was never part of the plan to kill any passengers, or even hold them hostage, and that something went wrong. His plan was to use the ship to get militants to Israel, he said. He was convicted in absentia by an Italian court for masterminding the hijacking.

Despite an outstanding Italian arrest warrant, he is not as elusive as his American captors suggest. For four years before the outbreak of the intifada in 2000 he was living openly in the Gaza Strip for much of the time. The Israeli authorities gave him permission to enter and leave Gaza several times. They even allowed him to travel inside Israel, to visit the town his family fled in 1948.

That was after an Israeli security commission found he had renounced violence. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled him immune from prosecution for the Achille Lauro hijacking under the Oslo peace accords. He returned to Iraq – where he had good relations with Saddam Hussein – a few weeks before the intifada began, after the peace process collapsed.

Unidentified associates of Abu Abbas in Lebanon were quoted yesterday as saying that he twice tried to leave Iraq through Syria but was refused entry by Syrian border guards. American officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, have repeatedly accused Syria of allowing members of President Saddam's regime through its border.

The Palestinian Authority is demanding his release under the Oslo accords, which were signed by the US as well as Israel and the Palestinians, and which say that no PLO official can be tried for violent acts committed before 1993. The US said the accords did not apply in a third country.

Apart from the Achille Lauro hijacking, Abu Abbas's PLF made few high-profile attacks. It specialised in far-fetched plans – often the stuff of Hollywood fantasy – to smuggle militants into Israel in hot-air balloons or rubber boats, which almost always went wrong. In the best-known fiasco, 17 PLF militants tried in 1990 to attack Israeli beaches by arriving on hang-gliders. The men were all intercepted by the Israeli military.

Abu Abbas may have renounced violence after the Oslo accords, but there have been unsubstantiated claims from Israeli security sources that several PLF militants were captured trying to get into Israel to attack Ben Gurion airport last summer, and that the group was behind the killing of an Israeli teenager in 2001.

Abu Abbas faces a bleak future. A life sentence awaits him if the US grants Italy's extradition request. If America decides to try him, he could be executed.