MS Achille Lauro, The Hijacked Liner and Its Troubled History

MS Achille Lauro was a cruise ship hijacking incident in 1985 that captured international attention when Palestinian Liberation Front members seized the vessel off Egypt. Built as the Dutch ocean liner Willem Ruys in the 1940s, the ship served multiple owners and routes before being sold to Italian interests in 1965, renamed, and eventually lost to fire in 1994.

From Willem Ruys to Achille Lauro

The vessel began life as Willem Ruys, ordered in 1938 by Rotterdamsche Lloyd to replace aging ships on the Dutch East Indies route. Laid down in 1939 at a shipyard in Vlissingen, Netherlands, construction was interrupted by World War II and bombing raids. The ship was finally launched in July 1946 and completed in late 1947. She measured 192 metres in length, 25 metres in beam, and 21,119 gross register tons, with eight Sulzer engines driving two propellers and capacity for 900 passengers.

Willem Ruys pioneered a design feature that became standard on modern cruise ships, low-slung aluminium lifeboats mounted within the upper-works’ flanks rather than on davits high above the deck. This arrangement was not widely adopted until the Canberra appeared in 1961, and today all cruise ships follow this layout, now using fibreglass-reinforced plastic for lifeboat hulls.

Service as Willem Ruys and Early Collisions

The maiden voyage began on 5 December 1947, and Willem Ruys became a popular fixture on the Dutch East Indies route alongside her running mate, MS Oranje. When the East Indies gained independence in 1949, passenger numbers fell sharply. The future prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, travelled aboard as a fresh graduate returning from studies in the United Kingdom.

On 6 January 1953, Willem Ruys collided with Oranje in the Red Sea while both ships were passing at close range to entertain their passengers. Oranje was heading in the opposite direction when an abrupt approach by that vessel caused Willem Ruys to swing unexpectedly to port, resulting in collision. Oranje suffered severe bow damage and was unable to call at Colombo as scheduled. No lives were lost, and later investigation attributed the accident to miscommunication between the two ships. Later that same year, on 26 June, Willem Ruys collided with and sank the Dutch coastal tanker Cornelis B in dense fog northwest of Ile de Batz.

After these incidents, Royal Rotterdam Lloyd moved Willem Ruys to the North Atlantic run, first serving New York and later Canada. In 1958, the company and Netherland Line created a round-the-world passenger service under the banner of The Royal Dutch Mail Ships. From September 1958 to February 1959, Willem Ruys underwent extensive refit at Schiedam, converting her from a liner into a cruise ship. Her four class distinctions became First and Tourist Class, with new cabins, air-conditioning, and European crew replacing the original Javanese staff. The refit increased her gross tonnage to 23,114 and passenger capacity to 1,167.

The Hijacking of 1985

In 1965, the ship was sold to Flotta Lauro Line and renamed Achille Lauro after the company’s owner. She was rebuilt and modernized following an onboard explosion that August, entering service in 1966. During the early 1970s, Achille Lauro was converted to a full cruise ship, though a disastrous fire broke out during the conversion in 1972. A 1975 collision with the cargo ship Youseff resulted in that vessel’s sinking. Another fire in 1981 temporarily removed her from service.

On 7 October 1985, four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front took control of Achille Lauro while she sailed from Alexandria to Port Said. The hijackers held passengers and crew hostage and directed the ship toward Tartus, Syria, demanding the release of 50 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. When Syria refused permission to dock, the hijackers killed disabled Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and threw his body overboard. After two days of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the ship in exchange for safe conduct and were flown toward Tunisia aboard an Egyptian airliner. U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat fighters intercepted the aircraft and forced it to land in Sicily. The four hijackers were eventually sentenced to prison by Italian courts, while the operation’s mastermind, who had not participated in the actual seizure, was given passage to Yugoslavia and escaped.

Final Years and Loss

Achille Lauro continued in service after the hijacking. The ship was re-flagged in 1989 when Lauro Line was taken over by Mediterranean Shipping Company and renamed StarLauro. In 1991, several episodes of the Australian soap opera Neighbours were filmed aboard during a honeymoon sequence.

On the evening of 30 November 1994, the ship caught fire off the coast of Somalia while carrying 979 passengers and crew en route to South Africa. Italian officials initially attributed the fire to a discarded cigarette, though later analysis suggested it started in the engine room after a crankcase explosion allowed cooling oil into the exhaust system. Lack of supervision allowed the fire to burn unchecked before discovery. The crew fought the fire unsuccessfully for hours using hoses and buckets from the swimming pool before the vessel was abandoned the following morning after developing a list. Two people died and eight were injured during evacuation. USS Gettysburg and USS Halyburton were among the ships responding to distress calls. Achille Lauro sank on 2 December 1994, witnessed by a fire tugboat that had arrived to assess whether salvage was possible.

Understanding the Vessel and Its Era

The term gross register tons measures a ship’s internal volume rather than weight, calculated as one ton per 100 cubic feet of enclosed space. Davits are mechanical arms that lower and raise lifeboats from a ship’s side. A ship’s list is a permanent tilt to one side caused by uneven weight distribution or flooding. Crankcases are the housings that contain a ship’s engine crankshaft and connecting rods.

Further Reading

Wikipedia and maritime archives hold additional details about Achille Lauro’s construction, service history, and the 1985 hijacking incident that made international headlines.