P.L.O. Aide Disputes Report of Killing

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

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UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., Oct. 10 — A Palestinian leader, Farouk Kaddoumi, said today that the killing of an American aboard the hijacked Italian cruise ship was “a big lie fabricated by the intelligence service of the United States.” Mr.

Kaddoumi, who heads the Political Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization, made the comment to reporters after a Security Council meeting on the Middle East. He declined to say whether the hijackers were in P.L.O. custody and, if so, whether the organization would turn them over to a sovereign state for prosecution.

He suggested that the P.L.O., Egypt and Italy might form a joint court to try the four hijackers since the Palestinians “don’t have a territory under which we can treat these people.” “Let’s have a joint court,” he said. “I don’t have any objection to that.” Mr.

Kaddoumi, in addressing the Security Council, suggested that the American victim, Leon Klinghoffer, might have died of natural causes. “Is there any evidence that those hijackers had killed that civilian?” he said. “Where is that evidence?” Noting that Mr. Klinghoffer was 69 years old and suffered frequently from heart attacks and paralysis, Mr.

Kaddoumi said he wondered “how and why” the hijackers should attack or kill “such an old person.” He said that the P.L.O. had cooperated in ending the hijacking and that Mr. Arafat had sent his condolences to the Klinghoffer family, even though “there is no proof so far that he was murdered.”

Gerardo de Rosa, the captain of the Italian ship, has told Italian television that a hijacker, who had blood on his clothing, admitted killing a passenger.

The Security Council meeting today, originally called by nations professing nonalignment to debate the Palestine question, was dominated by a discussion of the hijacking of the Italian ship and Egypt’s release of the four hijackers to the P.L.O. In the afternoon, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told the Security Council that Mr.

Klinghoffer and his wife “were singled out for one thing — because they are Jewish.” He said the hijacking of the cruise ship had been carried out “with the full and prior knowledge” of Mr. Arafat, whom Mr.

Netanyahu accused of “trying once again to turn a P.L.O.-initiated terrorist operation that failed into a personal victory for himself.” Vernon A. Walters of the United States, in a general statement about terrorism, said nationals of countries “represented around this table” had been “brutally slaughtered” by terrorists.

“They include a Soviet diplomat, an American sailor, as well as private citizens of Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and many other countries,” he said, adding that nationals of France, Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and other countries were still held hostage, an allusion to people kidnapped in Lebanon. Mr.

Walters did not mention the Tunisian and Palestinian victims of Israel’s aid raid last week on the P.L.O. headquarters in Tunis. “There is today no people, no government, no diplomat, no traveler who can count himself immune from the terrorists,” he said. “They are the enemies of us all.”

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"P.L.O. Aide Disputes Report of Killing," The New York Times, 11 October 1985, p. A14. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1985-017. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1985-017