Israel Matzav

Achille Lauro hijacker holed up in Nahr al-Bared 'camp' in Lebanon

Lebanese blogger Ya Libnan reports that former Achille Lauro hijacker Bassam al-Ashker is among the 'Palestinian' terrorists holed up in the Nahr al-Bared 'refugee camp' in Tripoli, Lebanon. (For those who have forgotten, the Achille Lauro cruise ship was hijacked by 'Palestinian' terrorists on October 7, 1985 and wheelchair-bound American Leon Klinghofer was eventually thrown overboard by the terrorists and drowned off the coast of Syria).

Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit

Bassam al-Ashker, now 39, told reporters by telephone that he is now a militiaman for the mainstream Fatah faction of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and saw it as his duty to brave the fighting to help the thousands of trapped civilians.

Ashker was just 17 when he took part in the assault on the Achille Lauro by commandos of the Palestine Liberation Front of Abu Abbas ... in which some 450 passengers were held hostage for several days and a wheelchair-bound U.S. tourist was killed.

He told reporters he had retained his radical anti-Western politics and, after fleeing Italy in 1991 following his release on parole from nearly six years in jail, spent 14 years in Iraq before moving to Lebanon's Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

"I organize the training of young Palestinian recruits who we send to fight the Americans alongside the Iraqi resistance," Ashker told reporters. "I have even fought them myself in Fallujah and Ramadi," two rebel bastions west of Baghdad.

Despite his anti-Western views, Ashker insisted he had no link with the Islamist fighters of fringe militant group Fatah al-Islam who are under siege by the Lebanese army and stand accused of using camp residents as human shields.

"They have certainly proved their military prowess," he said referring to the fighting of the past week in which 33 Lebanese soldiers but only 25 of the group's fighters were among the 78 dead.

"If they had used it to fight Israel, I would have been the first to join them, but they are fanatics who believe only in religion and have no regard of the consequences of their actions on civilians," he said.

"Not along time ago, Muslim clerics reminded them that it was wrong to attack Palestinians or Lebanese but they retorted that their religion took primacy over everything else."

Once a terrorist, always a terrorist.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:11 AM