Four men with weapons they had smuggled aboard in crates took control of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro on October 7, 1985, as it sailed from Alexandria toward Port Said. They belonged to a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front and demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. The ship was carrying about 400 passengers and 300 crew. The hijackers sorted out the American and British passengers, failed to get the negotiation they wanted, and turned the ship back toward Syria.
Syria refused it. Before they left, they killed one passenger: Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old American from New York who used a wheelchair after a stroke, was shot and pushed over the side along with his chair, and his body washed up on the Syrian coast two weeks later. The remaining passengers were released at Port Said after Egypt arranged for the four men to leave the country.
What followed is better remembered. An Egyptian airliner carrying the four men, their leader Abu Abbas, and an Egyptian escort was intercepted over the Mediterranean by United States Navy fighters on October 10 and forced down at the Sigonella air base in Sicily, where Italian troops and American special forces spent a night facing each other across the runway. Italy insisted on jurisdiction, since the ship was Italian and the crime had happened on board. The Italians held the hijackers, and let Abu Abbas go on to Yugoslavia over American objections.
They were tried in Genoa. They were convicted in 1986, and Abbas was convicted in absentia. He was captured by American forces in Iraq in 2003 and died in custody the following year. The Palestine Liberation Organization had disowned the operation at the time. Klinghoffer's daughters set up a foundation in their father's name, and the case is still cited whenever courts argue about who has the right to try a crime committed on a ship registered in one country and attacked in the waters of another.