There has been a lot of encouraging news out of the war in Iraq, but it is going to be hard to top the arrest of the Palestinian Arab terrorist known as Abu Abbas. He is the mastermind of the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1987. It was his thugs who shot a wheel-chair-bound New Yorker, Leon Klinghoffer, and then pushed him off the deck of the liner to his death in the Mediterranean, as Mrs. Klinghoffer watched in horror. No doubt there is now going to be a lot of legal maneuvering over this case. Abbas is facing a life sentence in Italy. But before he gets to serve it there will be a lot of us hoping that he will be brought to America for trial.

After the murder of Klinghoffer, Abbas won a deal for the killers to be flown to safety on a plane out of Egypt. An alert aide to President Reagan, Colonel Oliver North, caused American jets to be scrambled alongside the getaway plane. As that was happening, a young aide at the National Security Council, Michael Ledeen, who was fluent in Italian, frantically tracked down the Italian premier, Bettino Craxi, and translated between him and Mr. Reagan in an effort to get permission to bring the getaway jet down on Italian soil. When it was forced down at Sicily, Italian soldiers lowered their weapons against the Americans. So Abbas was handed over and permitted to make his escape.

The terrorist spent some years on the lam. He was eventually convicted in absentia in Italy, drawing a life sentence. During the years of appeasement known as the Oslo Accords, he lived in Gaza. More recently he fetched up at Iraq, where he skulked out his days under the protection of Saddam Hussein. After September 11 and President Bush’s vow to hunt down terrorists, Abbas had to “contemplate the day when American troops might arrive at his door,” as it was put by the New York Times’ man in Baghdad, John F. Burns, in a memorable dispatch on an interview Mr. Burns conducted with the terrorist in November of last year.

Abbas, Mr. Burns reported, was “keen to put distance between himself and the Muslim hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks” against America. Them he described as terrorists, Mr. Burns reported, but Abbas rejected any notion that the term applied to himself. In the Achille Lauro operation and later attacks, Mr. Burns quoted Abbas as saying, his group was serving what he described as a limited, historical goal — the liberation of Palestinians and the recovery of their “occupied” lands — and not the borderless, limitless holy war on America and Israel, and Americans and Jews, declared by Mr. bin Laden. “That,” Mr. Abbas was quoted by Mr. Burns as saying with emphasis, “is terrorism.”

Abbas was asked by Mr. Burns whether he was sorry for what happened to Klinghoffer. Abbas, Mr. Burns wrote, seemed to search for words that would express regret but not an apology and that would equate the Klinghof fer killing with American and Israeli military actions that have caused civilian deaths. “Of course, it wasn’t my fault,” Abbas told Mr. Burns. “I didn’t shoot the man. But he was a civilian, and I ask myself, ‘What was his fault?'” Then Abbas uttered this lie: “It is no different whoever the civilian who is killed may be — whether you drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki or you kill some innocent person who is walking down a road.”

Mr. Burns observed that the “difficulty, or impossibility, of making an ethical distinction between between the killing of the World Trade Center victims and the murder of Mr. Klinghoffer, who was a retired businessman, seemed lost on Mr. Abbas, as did the fact that an Italian court has convicted him of murder in the Klinghoffer case.” After interviewing Abbas, Mr. Burns reached one of Klinghoffer’s two daughters, Lisa Klinghoffer, who said the family still hoped that Abbas would be brought to justice for her father’s murder. “Nothing Abu Abbas says matters,” she said. That will never be more appropriately underlined than when the killer utters his last words before being escorted to the gallows.