Free Republic

U.S. convicts "Prince of Marbella" of arms deal Thu Nov 20, 2008 1:17pm EST By Edith Honan NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. federal jury convicted a Syrian arms dealer and a co-defendant on Thursday of conspiring to sell $1 million in weapons...Monzer al-Kassar, 62, a longtime resident of Spain known as the "Prince of Marbella" for his lifestyle in the glitzy seaside town... Kassar has been selling weapons since the 1970s to the Palestinian Liberation Front and clients in Nicaragua, Bosnia, Croatia, Iran, Iraq and Somalia. In 1995, Kassar was tried and acquitted of supplying arms that were used...

International Arms Dealer who was involved in the Achille Lauro terrorist incident is convicted http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=20206164&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=623508&rfi=6

The ringleader of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro ship will be expelled from Italy to Syria, the Associated Press reports. Youssef Magied al-Molqui has served only 23 years of his 30-year jail sentence for his role in the hijacking and murder of wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer. Italy’s Attorney General Gianfranco Pagano said that Molqui was to be flown on Saturday from his holding cell in Sicily to Rome and then onto Damascus. Molqui's claim that he should not be expelled due to his marriage to an Italian citizen was rejected by an Italian court. Nor did his...

Wednesday, April 16, 2003 The daughters of an elderly man who was killed by a violent Palestinian group during the hijacking of a cruise ship in 1985 hailed the arrest of the faction's leader and said it will send a message to other terrorists. "We are delighted that the murderous terrorist Abul Abbas is in U.S. custody," Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, the daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, said in a statement provided by family friend and spokeswoman Letty Simon on Tuesday night. Abbas, who led a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front, was taken by American special operations forces during a...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...