Abdul Rahim Khalid

Greek police officers said Monday that they are holding a Palestinian convicted and sentenced in absentia for planning the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in which wheelchair-bound American tourist Leon Klinghoffer was murdered and dumped overboard. Palestinian Abdul Rahim Khalid, 50, was arrested March 5 along with Petros Floros and two other Greeks after a bomb was found in Floros' Athens house.

Greek police officers said Monday that they are holding a Palestinian convicted and sentenced in absentia for planning the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in which wheelchair-bound American tourist Leon Klinghoffer was murdered and dumped overboard. Palestinian Abdul Rahim Khalid, 50, was arrested March 5 along with Petros Floros and two other Greeks after a bomb was found in Floros' Athens house.

Peter Sellars, the director of the Los Angeles Festival, has sprung up afresh in Europe with a new opera that seems destined to prove no less controversial politically than artistically. "The Death of Klinghoffer," which met a lukewarm response in its world premiere here Tuesday at the breathtakingly baroque Theatre de la Monnaie, is loosely based on the 1985 hijacking of a Mediterranean cruise ship by four Palestinian terrorists.