Achille Lauro hijacker released
The Palestinian man who led the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship has been released from an Italian prison.
Youssef Magied al-Molqui left the prison April 29 and was ordered to leave Italy. He was released early for good behavior after serving 24 years of a 30-year sentence, even though he failed to return to the prison in 2006 after a 12-day furlough and was later arrested in Spain.
Palestinian guerrillas hijacked the Achille Lauro in 1985. The four hijackers shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American Jewish man who was in a wheelchair, and threw his body overboard.
Molqui is married to an Italian woman. His attorney says there is no country that is willing to take him. — jta
Polish party fielding anti-Semitic candidates
A new Polish political party is fielding candidates for European Parliament elections who have been associated with anti-Semitic positions.
The Euro-skeptical party, whose platform is anti-European integration, plans to run in the June 4-7 elections.
Its candidates include Ryszard Bender, a historian of the Catholic University of Lublin who said in 2000 on the Catholic nationalist station Radio Maryja that Auschwitz was “not a death camp but a labor camp. Jews, Gypsies and others were killed by hard labor, not always that hard, and not always killed.”
Also on the slate is Anna Sobecka, who is known for her support of Radio Maryja, which has been criticized frequently by rights groups for airing editorials by anti-Semitic commentators.
Both Sobecka and Bender are former members of the Polish parliament and belonged to the League of Polish Families, whose members were accused of anti-Semitic ideology. — jta
Swedish teen jailed for Davis Cup protest
A Swedish teenager was sentenced to 15 months in prison for rioting at an anti-Israel protest during a Davis Cup tennis match.
The Malmo District Court sentenced the 18-year-old for throwing paving stones at police outside the arena where Sweden and Israel were playing behind closed doors. He also was found guilty of drug possession, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Police detained nearly 100 people and arrested 10 during the March 7 riots.
Spectators were not allowed at the matches because Malmo city officials said they could not guarantee security at the venue due to Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
The Davis Cup Committee fined the Swedish tennis federation $25,000 and banned Malmo from hosting Davis Cup matches for five years because of the decision. — jta
Fire partially destroys Lithuanian wooden shul
Fire partially destroyed a historic wooden synagogue building in Lithuania.
The May 3 blaze seriously damaged the roof, ceiling and walls of the former synagogue in the village of Pakruojis, destroying about one-third of the building. The cause of the fire was not known, but news reports said arson was suspected.
Townspeople reported that the bench outside the building was a drinking hangout for local youths and that this was the third time they had attempted to set fire to the building in the past two years.
The synagogue, built in about 1801, was the oldest of the dozen or so wooden synagogues to survive in Lithuania. Long abandoned, it was used as a cinema and sports hall in the 1950s.
Last year art historians raised an alarm about the building’s deterioration.
Many ornate wooden synagogues stood in Eastern Europe before World War II, but all were destroyed by the Nazis. — jta
Anti-Zionist party in France may be barred from elections
An anti-Zionist ticket could be barred from European Parliament elections in June because it may be an illegal cover for anti-Semitism, France’s general secretary announced.
French judges and the interior minister are investigating whether the anti-Zionist party platform headed by a comedian known as Dieudonné is in fact anti-Semitic, General Secretary Claude Guéant announced this week.
Dieudonné, who previously has run for political office, announced at the end of March that he would head an anti-Zionist ticket. In December he stirred controversy when he invited a Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson, to join him in one of his performances, and he has been condemned for anti-Semitic hate speech in the past. — jta
Ahmadinejad meets Assad, Hamas leader in Damascus
The relationship between Syria and Iran is “deepening and developing on various levels,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in Damascus.
The Iranian president and Syrian President Bashar Assad met May 5 during Ahmadinejad’s formal visit to his closest ally in the region.
Assad said during a joint news conference that the two leaders discussed the Palestinians, the situation in Iraq and Iran’s nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad also met with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal and with representatives of nine other Palestinian organizations to send a message to the new Israeli government that they were united against it, Ynet reported. — jta
Ahmadinejad nixes Brazil visit after protests
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad canceled his visit to Latin America one day after Jewish-led protests in Brazil.
No reason was given for the cancellation, which was announced May 4 by the Iranian news agency IRNA.
Thousands of Brazilians Jews and non-Jews demonstrated May 3 in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro against Ahmadinejad’s visit, scheduled for May 6. It would have been the Iranian president’s first stop in Latin America.
In Sao Paulo, some 1,000 people — including secular and Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Christians, gays and Gypsies, gathered in a main square to protest. In Rio, another 1,000 demonstrators walked along Ipanema beach carrying signs and shouting messages against terrorism, homophobia and racism. — jta
New visitors information center opens at Dachau camp site
A new information center at Dachau opened last week to help the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the Nazis’ first concentration camp to better understand its history.
International Dachau Committee President Pieter Dietz de Loos said the new visitors center is intended to “connect the past, present and future.” More than 800,000 people pass through Dachau every year, many of them schoolchildren.
Visitors enter the camp itself through the original main gate, the so-called Jourhaus, following in the footsteps of more than 200,000 inmates from across Europe who were imprisoned there during the 12 years it existed.
Located off the official grounds, the new center has been designed to blend with the crude architecture of the camp, built in 1933 and used as the model for all subsequent concentration camps. — ap