Word: ported
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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...
...even know what their demands were, and that they might kill me for something I didn't know anything about. It seemed so unfair." On the bridge, one of the gunmen fired more shots and then ordered De Rosa to sail in a northeasterly direction toward the Syrian port of Tartus. A hijacker brandishing a submachine gun kept De Rosa under constant guard...
That night, as the ship was cruising about 30 miles north of Port Said, De Rosa made contact with Egyptian port authorities by radio and told them what had happened. The hijackers, who had identified themselves as members of the P.L.F., demanded the 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...
...about that time, the passengers who had spent the day in Cairo arrived in Port Said. There would be a delay, they were told, because of heavy traffic in the port. Not until midnight did an Italian consular official advise them that the Achille Lauro had been hijacked. Buses then took them back to Cairo, where they arrived after 3 a.m. For them, the waiting had just begun. In the lobby of the Concorde Hotel, Frank Hodes remarked the next day, "We are sitting here in total silence. We are getting no information at all." Charlotte Spiegel of New York...
...beach people" were taken to Cairo to prepare for the long, sad flight home, with a detour to Italy, where she helped pick the four hijackers out of a lineup. On Saturday, after waiting two days for the Egyptian government to permit the Achille Lauro to leave Port Said, the ship's owners announced that the remainder of the eleven-day cruise had been canceled...