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It was not to be. The day before the session was scheduled to begin, the Palestinian delegates, Anglican Bishop Elia Khoury of Amman and Mohammed Milhem, former mayor of the Israeli-occupied West Bank village of Halhul, suddenly balked. After consultation, the pair refused to sign a declaration that acknowledged Israel's right to exist. Howe called the cancellation a "disappointment and a setback," but added, "We must not allow it to be a fatal one." The problem for the P.L.O. was compounded on Tuesday when Jordan's King Hussein announced his support for the British decision to call | off the meeting. Said Hussein: "We'll have to see what went wrong and how it can be corrected."
Arafat soon suffered another serious diplomatic blow. Under heavy U.S. pressure, including intimations that Reagan would cancel his own planned visit this week, the General Assembly backed away from a proposed invitation to the P.L.O. chairman to speak during the U.N.'s 40th-anniversary celebrations.
In Rome, meanwhile, the Craxi government's impending collapse had become almost inevitable. By Wednesday, Spadolini had made it official: he and two other Republican Party ministers were leaving the government. Craxi scheduled a parliamentary debate on the hijacking issue for the next day and observed, "Now everything is more difficult and uncontrollable."
In parliament, the Prime Minister delivered a spirited defense of his actions during the hijacking ordeal. Then Craxi made the five-minute trip to President Francesco Cossiga's Quirinale Palace to resign. Craxi's government had served 26 months, which was one month shy of the tenure record for the 44 governments Italy has had in the past 39 years. Instead, the outgoing coalition earned a new distinction: it was the first one to fall owing to a foreign policy crisis rather than a domestic one. At week's end Cossiga was carrying on discussions with all of the country's political parties before calling on anyone to form a new government. One possible candidate: Craxi again.
Italian antiterrorist forces were meanwhile assembling the case for the prosecution of the cruise-liner terrorists and widening the net of guilt. Five days prior to the cruise hijacking, police in Genoa, the home port of the Achille Lauro, had picked up a young Palestinian, Khalif Zainab, for possessing both Iraqi and Moroccan passports. In due course, he too was charged with murder, multiple kidnaping and lesser weapons charges along with the original four terrorist detainees. (The quartet: Abdel Atif Ibrahim, 19, Hallah Abdullah Hassan, 19, Hammad Ali Abdullah, 23, Majed Youssef Molky, 23.)
A total of six arrest warrants were issued. Italian authorities believe that they have identified another terrorist who purchased tickets on the Achille Lauro for himself and for the four hijackers being held in Spoleto. Yet another suspect was registered aboard the cruise liner as a Greek citizen, but left the ship prior to the hijacking, at the Egyptian port of Alexandria.