Cruise Gone Wrong: Terrorism on the High Seas

After their cruise ship was hijacked by Palestinians in October 1985, Marilyn Klinghoffer struggled to care for her sickly husband, Leon. One of the hijackers, Bassam al-Ashker, put a blanket over him, a gesture of kindness. But afterward another hijacker, Youssef Magid al-Molqi, shot Klinghoffer twice and ordered that his body and wheelchair be thrown into the sea. In “An Innocent Bystander: The Killing of Leon Klinghoffer,” Julie Salamon describes these moments in an effort to tell the human side of a harrowing tale.

The hijackers tried fruitlessly to negotiate the release of dozens of Palestinians who were being held in Israeli prisons and — after killing Klinghoffer — fled the ship. His death, and the hijacking on the high seas, Salamon writes, helped to “alert the public to the threat of terrorism, which still seemed remote to Americans in the days before 9/11.”