Word: lauro
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...American passengers was a group of eleven old friends from New York City and northern New Jersey. Mostly in their 60s and 70s, they liked to vacation together on the Jersey shore and sometimes called themselves "the beach people." On Sunday, the night before the 23,629-ton Achille Lauro reached Alexandria, they celebrated the 59th birthday of Marilyn Klinghoffer of Manhattan. It had been her idea that they should all take the eleven-day cruise from Genoa to Naples, Alexandria, Port Said, Ashdod, Limassol, Rhodes, Piraeus, Capri and back to Genoa...
...passengers had noticed the four Palestinians who had boarded the ship at Genoa. They kept to themselves and did not take part in any shipboard activities. One of the Achille Lauro hostesses later recalled asking the young men their nationality and receiving the improbable and barely intelligible reply, "Norwegian...
Once his passengers had disembarked at Alexandria, Captain Gerardo De Rosa ordered the anchor raised, and soon the Achille Lauro was sailing for Port Said, at the northern approach to the Suez Canal, under a brilliant blue sky. + There, late that evening, he was scheduled to pick up the passengers who had gone to Cairo and proceed to the Israeli port of Ashdod...
...event, they decided to attack. Just four hours after the Achille Lauro had left Alexandria, the four Palestinians, armed with Soviet-made submachine guns, hand grenades and explosives, seized the ship. Firing their weapons wildly, the terrorists used the ship's loudspeaker system to summon all passengers to the dining room. "We were getting ready for dessert," one of the American passengers, Viola Meskin, of Union, N.J., later recalled, "when suddenly we heard gunshots, and someone yelled, 'Get down on the floor!' We heard moaning and groaning. The bandits had struck men in the kitchen, we were told. Then they...
...release of the 50 prisoners being held in Israel. Among these was Sami Kuntar, a well-known terrorist who in 1979, with three others, had staged an attack on the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, killing three people. If their demands were not met, the hijackers of the Achille Lauro warned, they would blow up the ship...