The terrorist attack on the cruise ship “City of Poros” on July 11, 1988, constitutes one of the darkest pages in Greek shipping and tourism. The massacre cost the lives of 10 people and injured dozens, shocking Greek and international public opinion.
One of the blackest days for our tourism and shipping was July 11, 1988, when the great massacre took place on the Greek cruise ship “City of Poros” in the Saronic Gulf.
The prospectus of the owning company of the cruise ship “City of Poros,” which conducted daily excursions to the islands of the Saronic Gulf, informed tourists: “It will be an unforgettable cruise.” Only for the 471—mostly European—tourists who boarded the cruise ship on the morning of July 11, 1988, from Trokadero, what remained unforgettable was the intense shock from the bloody onslaught of armed terrorists who opened fire with automatic weapons against passengers and crew while explosive devices also detonated, resulting in at least 10 people killed and 60 injured, with the ship’s bridge completely destroyed and the vessel engulfed in flames. The investigation revealed that behind the attack was the organization “Fatah-Revolutionary Council” of Abu Nidal, who died in 2002.
The ship belonged to the company “Cycladic Cruises” of the Kyrtatas brothers, was 60 meters long, could reach 26 knots, and carried 500 passengers and crew.
But let’s take it from the beginning.
On July 11, 1988, at 2:45 PM in Trokadero, where the City of Poros was about to dock, a booby-trapped Datsun Sunny car exploded directly opposite the Naval Club Amphitheater. The four occupants were obliterated, while the explosion destroyed the car and caused damage within a 300-meter radius.
From the morning of the same day, the City of Poros had begun its beloved daily cruise to Hydra, Aegina, and Poros, departing from Flisvos Marina with 471 tourists as passengers and a 25-member crew. The passengers were overwhelmingly foreign, primarily European but also American.
It was about five hours after the explosion in Trokadero, as the cruise was nearing completion, when the attack on the “City of Poros” occurred, concluding the terrorists’ work that day. The “unforgettable,” as the company advertised, journey of the City of Poros was destined to end in tragedy.
It was 6:45 PM, and the ship was departing from Aegina. The cruise around the Saronic islands was nearing its end, with passengers happily returning to Athens.
Suddenly, among the deserted islets of Lagouses, three miles off Aegina, an armed man who had boarded in Aegina pulled out an automatic weapon and began firing indiscriminately. Panic naturally ensued. Passengers ran in all directions, and many fell into the sea. Part of the ship was engulfed in flames, and chaos prevailed. Some passengers jumped into the sea to save themselves, resulting in some losing their lives after becoming entangled in the ship’s propellers.
The armed man continued shooting in every direction and throwing grenades. During the attack, seven passengers lost their lives (four French, one Dane, one Swede, and one Hungarian), while 60 were injured.
Also killed was the deputy Antonis Deimezis, when a mechanism carried by the armed man, who was outside the cabin of the sub-lieutenant, exploded. During the explosion, the perpetrator was also killed, who was later identified as Mohammed Sozad Adnan, 21 years old. Witnesses later said there were two armed men who killed each other. They were the 21-year-old terrorist who was identified and had been in Greece for three months, as well as a 21-year-old French student of Jewish descent named Roland Vinieron, 21 years old, whose role was never clarified.
The investigations conducted after the attack showed that Adnan was shooting indiscriminately at people. The evidence did not indicate that the Frenchman was Adnan’s accomplice, as he appeared to be shooting while almost spinning around himself. Vinieron was also among the dead.
The rescue operation was carried out by those who were not injured and by other ships that arrived shortly after a distress signal was transmitted to the city of Poros. Many of those in the water were rescued by these ships and taken to the shore, where emergency services were waiting to transport the more seriously injured to hospitals. In total, six dead were found on the deck of the cruise ship, and three more people lost their lives in hospitals due to their injuries.
#### The enigmas and the interconnection of the two terrorist acts were something the Police and the Coast Guard undertook to solve.
As it turned out, the two attacks had one thing in common: the four people killed in the car were Arabs, as was one of the two armed men on the ship.
One of the Arabs in the car was Amoud Aboul Hamid, who had traveled from Beirut to Sofia and from there to Belgrade, from where he came to Athens. With him until Belgrade had also traveled Mohammed Sozad Adnan, the perpetrator of the terrorist act on the “City of Poros,” who, for obvious reasons, arrived in Greece by train on May 8, two days before Hamid.
From the fingerprint examination conducted in cooperation with Interpol, it was determined that another of the dead in the car was the 38-year-old Hejab Jabal, who 10 years earlier, on February 19, 1978, participated in the assassination of the Egyptian journalist and close friend of Anwar Sadat, Youssef El-Sebai in Nicosia, the responsibility for which was claimed by the organization of the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.
After the assassination of the Egyptian journalist, who was participating in an international conference at the Hilton in Nicosia, the armed perpetrators took dozens of conference attendees hostage, demanding that the Cypriot government secure their escape by air. When the plane was found, it took off from Larnaca, but no airport would accept them. Thus, they were forced to return to Larnaca Airport, where in the meantime there was the arrival of an Egyptian commando, something that happened despite the objections of the Cypriot Government, and whose sudden assault resulted in a massacre between Egyptian and Cypriot special forces. Although Jabal was arrested by the Cypriot Authorities, he was later released as an exchange for the release of two Cypriot students who had been abducted in Beirut!
The Abu Nidal organization claimed responsibility for both the bomb and the attack on the ship.
The trial for the three former members of the Palestinian organization Abu Nidal began without his presence in Paris in 2012. The international arrest warrant had been issued since 1992. Abu Nidal was found dead in Baghdad in 2002, while he had organized 12 armed attacks in Greece.
### What really happened on the “City of Poros”
Eleven years after the explosion at Trocadéro and the bloodshed on the cruise ship, eyewitnesses and those who investigated the case revealed to the newspaper TO VIMA that the target of the attack was a group of tourists from the U.S. who were expected to board the ship that day. The booby-trapped car with explosives would approach the disembarkation area of the travelers. The ensuing explosion would cause the “expected bloodshed.” This was the criminal plan, for which members of Abu Nidal’s organization had expressed their disagreement, foreseeing the futility of the massacre. However, perhaps due to a mistake, sabotage, or the frenzy of failure, all the terrorists were killed. Yet, they managed to cold-bloodedly execute nine travelers.
“TO VIMA” reveals by recording a series of testimonies, not only from eyewitnesses of the massacre but also from Security and Coast Guard officials who investigated the case at the time, as well as from foreign researchers who in recent years gathered detailed information about the movements of the terrorists. The new evidence reconstructs the “image” of the horrific incident and provides some explanation for the tragic, unimaginable outcome of the idyllic journey on the daily route of the “City of Poros.”
The time was 6:48 p.m. on July 11, 1988, when the white cruise ship of the company “Cycladic Cruises,” after its tour of Methana, Poros, and Aegina, was approaching Trocadéro. At that moment, behind the bridge of the cruise ship, on the left side of the upper deck, deafening noises began to be heard…
“At first, we thought it was some travelers dragging chairs on the wooden deck, and when they hit the gaps between the planks, they created this noise. Only this time, the sound was much louder. Moments later, I saw from the bridge that someone was shooting toward the crowd.”
The captain of the “City of Poros,” Giorgos Mavrommatakis, who has since retired from active duty, remembers the start of the bloody attack. The captain and the first mate Antonis Deimezis were trapped in two cabins behind the ship’s bridge and could only hear the indiscriminate, continuous gunfire toward the passengers’ side. The travelers, who until that moment had been enjoying the afternoon sun, were now frantically trying to avoid the death being spread by the semi-automatic weapon. Panicked people, who before they could realize what was happening, were falling dead from the rapid gunfire…
But who was suddenly, senselessly killing the unsuspecting travelers? Who could understand the reason for the criminal frenzy? Who at that moment could connect the executioner’s madness with the incident that some crew members of the cruise ship had learned about from the television in Aegina?
### The explosion at Trocadéro
At 2:45 p.m. on the same day, a Datsun Sunny car, with license plate YIZ 6963, exploded opposite the Naval Club Amphitheatre.
In the car there was an improvised explosive device, of great power, which detonated for an unknown reason. The car was torn into shapeless masses of iron and the previously unknown passengers were almost vaporized. The explosion created a crater one meter deep and human remains were found at a distance of up to 300 meters.
This was the beginning of the double bloody incident, which would culminate in the attack against the tourists.
The terrorist stood outside the cabin where the deputy chief Antonis Deimezis was located, at the top of the stairs leading to the second deck, even taking care to throw grenades and fire blindly down the stairs…
Soon the massacre would end with an explosion at the base of the outer shell of the bridge’s superstructure, near the deputy chief’s cabin. From the explosion, which, as it appears, was caused by the terrorist with explosive material he had in a bag, he himself was dismembered and killed, as was the deputy chief, who was at the same height on the inner side of the bridge, separated from the terrorist only by a metal sheet.
Tragic toll: 13 dead, of whom four were passengers of the car at Trocadéro and nine from the cruise ship, where there were also 60 injured from the continuous gunfire and successive explosions…
The investigation by the prosecuting authorities was divided into two parts, as the jurisdictions dictate. The explosion at Trocadéro was investigated by the Police, while the inexplicable human sacrifice on the cruise ship “City of Poros” was examined by the port authorities. And there begins the dispute over the identity of those involved in the attack…
Six days after the massacre, the Attica Security presented the protagonists of the incident at Trocadéro. They were the individuals for whom there was absolute certainty regarding their participation in the terrorists’ strike team and their presence at the “double” incident…
Central protagonist was the 38-year-old Hajab Jabala, who was born in Benghazi and had entered—using a Libyan passport—our country on June 1, 1988, from Copenhagen. He was the organizer of the attack, but not, as further investigations proved, the mastermind or driving force. Jabala or Samir Khantar participated, on February 19, 1978, in the assassination of Egyptian journalist Yusuf El-Sabai, which ended in a bloodbath at Larnaca Airport. Jabala or Khantar, immediately after the assassination of Sabai, who was an advocate of the moderate policies of the assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, had taken foreign conference attendees hostage and demanded a plane to escape. This was followed by a sudden deployment of Egyptian commandos in Larnaca, modeled after the Israeli operation at Entebbe, but the Cypriot National Guard reacted, leading to a bloody exchange of fire that ended in slaughter. Jabala or Khantar was arrested but was released, in complete secrecy, in exchange for two Cypriot students who had been abducted in Beirut.
From findings in Jabala’s apartment, at 6 Grigoriou Lampraki Street in Glyfada, it was determined that he was the manufacturer of the explosives used at Trocadéro, while he had all the details concerning the movements of the remaining members of the team.
Also participating in the organization were Amoud Aboul Hamid and Mehri Megendin, who had come to Greece two months earlier from Sofia and Belgrade respectively and were collaborating with Tzambala, and another individual for whom only… fragments of his photograph were found. Lastly, the 21-year-old Mohamad Sozad Adnan. He was the executor of the “City of Poros.” He had come to Greece on April 3, 1988, from Beirut and participated in the cruise equipped normally with a ticket in his name.
And while Security, under the orders of its then director Mr. G. Vasilopoulos and with the collaboration of officers Mr. D. Karagiotis, P. Kotsiris, and F. Nasiakou, was trying to determine the entanglement and origin of the terrorists, the Port Authority was in the “whirl” of investigating the reported involvement in the attack on the ship of the 21-year-old French student Roland Vinieron. It is even mentioned that Vinieron and Adnan may have exchanged gunfire.
“From the printing, the same night of the massacre, of the photographs taken by the cruise ship’s photographer, we concluded that the executor who certainly participated in the attack was this young, dark-skinned man wearing a Robbe di Kappa sweatshirt. Dozens of witnesses had identified him, and as we later determined, this was Mohamad Sozad Adnan. He was the one standing on the left side, behind the bridge, shooting indiscriminately. However, I must say there was a series of testimonies speaking of the participation of another individual, who was wearing a khaki sweatshirt. Some of the witnesses identified this person at the morgue. That this person was the student Roland Vinieron, we learned after the identification, a few days later. These emerged from our investigation,” states today the then central port authority chief of Piraeus—now retired from active duty—Mr. Manolis Peloponnesios.
The investigations and the taking of testimonies from the passengers of the “City of Poros” had been undertaken by the Port Authority Security director Mr. Nikos Voulgaris, who is now at the Consular Port Authority in Limassol.
**Mystery with Vinieron**
“In the case file of the ‘City of Poros,’ there are about 10 eyewitness testimonies that not one but two individuals participated in the attack. Most of the witnesses identified the French student as the second person shooting at people. But verifying exactly what happened was extremely difficult, as the water thrown to extinguish the fire from the explosion essentially erased the traces and moved the casings. And so it was not possible to determine from the evidence the position of the attackers,” states today a high-ranking Port Authority officer who participated in the investigations.
One of the eyewitnesses who, according to information, supported the involvement of the French student in the attack was the then 25-year-old ship sailor Mr. Yiannis Petridis.
“I had the impression that two people were shooting. However, I am not certain, as I was on the second deck and did not have visual contact with the bridge. Later, I saw bullets on the railings of the upper deck, exactly opposite where the Palestinian was. From what I remember, I saw Vinieron’s body, who had been shot in the back, not on the upper but on the second deck,” clarifies today Mr. G. Petridis.
Meanwhile, one of the other sailors of the “City of Poros,” Mr.
Stavros Xypnitis emphasizes that “whoever, at least among the Greek crew members, could have mentioned the involvement of a second person in the attack or specifically the French student, is certain that they are not telling the truth. No one was on the upper deck and had the ability to see exactly what was happening.” The former sailor of the ill-fated cruise ship further claims that “the investigations may have been rushed to close the case, and there was insistence on the issue of Vinieron’s participation or not.”
Due to the mention of Roland Vinieron’s name in the terrorist attack, as well as the large number of French victims, a team from the French Judicial Police arrives in Athens, led by their supervisor Mr. Jacques-Luc Briguer, who is considered an expert on terrorism issues and still heads this service today. They visit the destroyed cruise ship and are briefed on the progress of the investigations by both the Police and the Port Authority. Their attention focuses on the reported involvement of the French terrorist Roland Vinieron, for whom they show intense interest but also express the French government’s discomfort. In fact, the then Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou had telephone conversations during those days with President Mitterrand and Foreign Minister Mr. Roland Dumas, providing relevant clarifications…
The certainty about Vinieron’s non-involvement appears to be reinforced, according to Security authorities, by something else. The conclusion after secret investigations into the entanglement and mainly the origin of the terrorists.
A particularly critical issue…
Investigations from forensic laboratories seem to clarify the exact roles of the individuals. All the weapon casings come from the semi-automatic of Italian origin belonging to Sozant Adnan, which was found next to his dismembered body. Even the bullets found in the “rails,” meaning the ship’s railings, belonged to Adnan’s weapon and came from his magazine, almost from rotations around himself. No “finding” identifies Vinieron’s involvement in the attack…
“It has been established by all subsequent investigations that there was no involvement by Vinieron. We have now formed a complete picture of exactly what happened that afternoon. And we know, without any doubt, the origin of the terrorists,” states a high-ranking State Security official who is considered an expert on international terrorism issues and has conducted a detailed, multi-year investigation of the tragic incident.
So what exactly happened on the “City of Poros”? Why was the attack carried out on the small cruise ship?
“During those days, we had information from various directions that there would be a terrorist strike on a Greek cruise ship. This had forced some of my colleagues at the time to halt major cruises to the Eastern Aegean and the Middle East. I too had been alarmed and had placed guards on the large cruise ships. However, I never expected that the attack would occur on the ‘City of Poros,’ a ship heading to Poros,” reveals today Mr. Andreas Kyrtatas, one of the owners of the company “Cycladic Cruises,” to which the “City of Poros” belonged.
The investigations conducted by Security authorities during the last decade of the previous century appear to solve the long-debated problem concerning the determination of the terrorists’ target.
As emerged from further investigations and the dossier still maintained today by counterterrorism services, the target was a group of 100 Americans, for whom the terrorists had information that they would board the ship. A State Security officer emphasized that the travel agency—not disclosed for obvious reasons—which had arranged the relevant trip was found, and it is speculated that the terrorists also had the relevant information. However, the agency canceled the trip at the last moment without Sozant realizing it, who had taken on the role of the “stand-in” on the ship. The plan involved approaching the car rigged with explosives to the passenger disembarkation area and, simultaneously with its detonation—which would cause massive bloodshed—Sozant had been assigned to shoot from the ship’s deck. But when he was informed of the explosion at Trocadéro, he chose human sacrifice and his “glorious” death. Filling the void, or rather the… crater left by the explosion at Trocadéro.
### The Fatah-RG Organization
But what was the origin of the terrorists?
According to findings from the multi-year investigations by prosecuting authorities, the “hit” on the *City of Poros* was an action by the Fatah-RG organization. According to a confidential report (from 1994) by State Security officers, “the organization, depending on the timing and the targets of the attacks it has planned internationally, has used various cover names, such as Black June, Arab Revolutionary Brigades, Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims, Black September, Al-Asifa, Soldiers of Justice, Revolutionaries of Egypt, Arab Fedayeen Cells. It was founded in 1974 when it split from Fatah, following disagreements with its leader Abu Nidal (real name: Sabri al-Banna), who was a dominant figure in the international terrorist sphere. The organization’s strength numbers around 1,000 men. Its headquarters were in Baghdad until 1982, then moved to Syria, and from 1985 to Libya. During the decade 1984-1994 in Greece, 12 incidents took place, for which responsibility was claimed or attributed to Abu Nidal’s organization.” Among these was the attack on the *City of Poros*…
The obvious correlation of the terrorist strike with the Fatah-RG organization is reinforced by the presence of the 38-year-old Jabala or Samir Khaddar.
Khaddar, as emerged from further investigations, was head of the Foreign Intelligence Committee in the Intelligence Directorate of Fatah-RG and one of Abu Nidal’s most trusted men. The man who carried out the most perilous missions.
Moreover, the “origin” of the terrorist attack from this sphere seems to be confirmed by another finding. The semi-automatic weapon used by the perpetrator of the cruise ship attack was from a batch of weapons manufactured in the country where the Fatah-RG organization had its headquarters. This finding appears to have caused turmoil in Greek prosecuting services, who tried to handle the case with the utmost “discretion” to avoid diplomatic complications.
The actions of the Fatah-RG organization, as well as the precise events on the *City of Poros*, are examined in the book *Abu Nidal—The Secret Operations of the Most Notorious Terrorist* (published by “Pontiki”) by Patrick Seale, one of the most distinguished British experts on Middle Eastern affairs and correspondent for the newspaper *The Observer*. Mr.
Seal, who invokes cross-referenced testimonies from defectors of the organization, states (p. 349) that “Khadar (n.b.: Seal refers to him as Khudr) did not know that Abu Nidal had given an order to one of his men, Hisham Harb, to adjust the bomb so that it would explode when Khadar was at the wheel of the car, and not when the car was on the ship, as originally planned. Others, such as Abd al-Rahman Isa, a member of the organization, claimed that Khadar had argued with Abu Nidal over the ‘City of Poros’ operation. Khadar could not understand what purpose it served. Other sources within the organization mentioned that Khadar was killed because he had become too powerful.”
After the attack on the “City of Poros,” information surfaced that Jabala or Khadar had managed to survive the massacre on the cruise ship and was not among the passengers in the car. Conversely, Mr. Patrick Seal expressed certainty that Khadar was killed, a claim also confirmed by a Security official: “It is certain that Khadar was the top lieutenant of Fatah-RG and was killed at Trocadéro.”
Abu Nidal died on August 16, 2002, in his apartment in Baghdad, from a gunshot wound. According to Palestinian sources, he was killed on Saddam Hussein’s orders, while Iraqi officials maintained that he committed suicide during an interrogation.
Compensation amounting to tens of millions was given to the victims’ families. As the shipowner Mr. A. Kyrtatas asserts, “there was no compensation claim from the Vinieron family.” One of the family’s lawyers, Mr. Philippe Capel, refused to clarify anything, stating that “for the Vinieron family, this tragic story has ended.”
The “City of Poros,” after repairs, resumed its daily Saronic Gulf cruises. It was decommissioned in 1993. Later, it was sold to another company and renamed “Iphigenia-Anna II.” In 2007, it was sold to Pentanisos Shipping Ltd and renamed “DAFNE.” A few years later, it was sent for scrapping in Eleusina.
Sources:
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