Abu Abbas: Unfinished business
By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent

Abu Abbas is a throwback to an earlier generation of Palestinian fighters, who carried out spectacular acts of hijacking around the world to draw attention to their cause.

His capture will be used by the United States as evidence that Iraq was harbouring international terrorists.

His fate, presumably prolonged imprisonment despite Palestinian demands that he be set free, will be an example to others in the current climate post 11 September.

Turning a blind eye to anyone who has a record like his is not an option for a US administration.

But he is not quite the big catch the Americans are seeking.

Different era

His arrest is a piece of unfinished business and not a breakthrough in the war on terror declared by President Bush.

He is not the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda which Washington has been seeking to establish.

He comes from a different era.

Abu Abbas ended up in Baghdad because there was nowhere else for this aging militant leader to go.

He and his kind have been partly overtaken by the new zealots from al-Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are motivated by religion as well as nationalism.

Even Israel allowed him in and out of Gaza a few years ago as it accepted that he had given up violence and was supporting the Oslo peace process.

Another Palestinian, Abu Nidal, the most famous in his day for acts of extremist violence and a man who rejected any settlement with Israel, also ended up in Baghdad.

He was found shot dead there last year though whether by his own hand, as the Iraqis suggested, or at the hands of the Iraqis themselves for some reason was never clear.

Most notorious action

Abu Abbas was from a time when the West Bank and Gaza were wholly under Israeli control and Palestinians could not carry out attacks inside Israel very easily.

Instead they resorted to action internationally or across the Israeli borders.

The Palestine Liberation Front which Abbas led was a little known faction even at the time. But it was often quite daring. It once used hang gliders to get into Israel from Lebanon.

Its most notorious action, the hijacking of the liner Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean in 1985, is now mainly remembered for the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, disabled New York Jew.

He was shot in his wheelchair and thrown overboard.

Abu Abbas made an apology of sorts later, saying that the shooting had been a "mistake".

Leon Klinghoffer's family never accepted that statement as genuine. In fact, Abbas told the Boston Globe in 1998 that Klinghoffer was "inciting and provoking the other passengers. So the decision was made to kill him."

The murder did great damage to the Palestinian cause internationally and was one of the events which eventually drove the Palestinians to change their tactics and open talks with Israel about a two state solution.

Example

What will become of him is not immediately clear.

He will presumably be sent for justice in Italy, where he was sentenced to five life terms in absentia.

The Italians had let him go when US fighter planes forced down an Egyptian aircraft in which he was travelling after the hijack ended.

They were forced to make amends after widespread protests.

The days of those kinds of quiet releases by governments seeking to avoid holding onto inconvenient prisoners are over.