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Elie Wiesel: "UNESCO has escaped a scandal, a moral disaster. Mr. Hosni did not deserve the job he does not deserve this honor. This is not someone, in my opinion, who should have even be a candidate for this position."
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PARIS (EJP)---Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel said Wednesday Faruq Hosni, the Egyptian Culture Minister who failed to win the election for the top UNESCO job, helped the escape of the Palestinian terrorists who seized the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985.
"It is Hosni who helped the escape of the Achille Lauro terrorists, who literally threw into the sea a disabled man in a wheelchair," Wiesel said in an interview with a French radio.
On October 7, 1985 four heavily armed terrorists representing the Palestine Liberation Front hijacked the Achille Lauro, with some 100 mostly elderly passengers on board, in Egyptian waters.
The hijackers demanded that Israel free 50 Palestinian prisoners, and to prove their determination, they shot and killed a disabled American Jewish tourist, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, and threw his body overboard with his wheelchair.
After a two-day drama, the Egyptian government provided the hijackers with safe passage in exchange for freeing the ship and its passengers.
Wiesel based his accusation on Arabic-language media reports that said Hosni had helped organize the transfer of the Achille Lauro hijackers to Tunisia aboard an Egyptian airliner.
"UNESCO has escaped a scandal, a moral disaster. Mr. Hosni did not deserve the job he does not deserve this honor. This is not someone, in my opinion, who should have even be a candidate for this position," Wiesel said.
The Egyptian Culture Minister was beaten by Bulgarian Irina Bokova, a career diplomat, who will succeed in October Japanese Koichiro Matsuura as the next UNESCO director-general.