Greek police have arrested a suspect in the 1985 hijacking of an American flight that lasted 17 days — and saw a US sailor shot dead and dumped on the tarmac.

The 65-year-old Lebanese man was arrested on Thursday on the Greek island of Mykonos after being flagged as wanted on a German warrant connected to the infamous hijacking of TWA Flight 847, officials said.

“If it’s him, I hope they bring him back,” said Richard Stethem, the father of US Navy diver Robert Stethem, 23, who was beaten unconscious, shot dead, then dumped at the Beirut airport during the hijacking.

“We’ve been hoping that for a long time,” the 84-year-old father told The Post on Sunday. “They said they’ll always go after them. They’ll never forget. And I believe them.”

Greek police have declined to give the arrested man’s name.

In Beirut, the Foreign Ministry named him as Mohammad Saleh, a journalist from the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.

“The Lebanese Embassy in Athens is following the case of Lebanese journalist Mohammad Saleh who has been detained by Greek police,” the ministry told Lebanon’s National News Agency, according to CNN.

But several Greek media outlets identified the suspect as Mohammed Ali Hammadi, who was arrested in Frankfurt in 1987 and convicted in Germany for the hijacking and Stethem’s slaying.

The new arrest was a surprising development in the case, which made international headlines more than 30 years ago after gunmen seized the flight shortly after takeoff from Athens on June 14, 1985, and diverted it to Beirut, Algiers, and then Beirut again.

Cameras followed the drama daily and were there when the body of Robert Stethem was dumped on the tarmac.

“It brings back a lot of memories — that’s the hardest thing right there,” Richard Stethem, of Myrtle Beach, SC, told The Post Sunday.

The remaining 146 passengers and crew were released in stages, and it took 17 days before the final one was freed from the Boeing jet, which had originated in Cairo and was heading to Rome, Boston, Los Angeles, and then San Diego.

Hammadi, an alleged Hezbollah member, was sentenced to life in prison but paroled in 2005 and returned to Lebanon.

Germany had resisted pressure to extradite him to the US after Hezbollah abducted two German citizens in Beirut and threatened to kill them.

Hammadi, along with fellow alleged hijacker Hasan Izz-Al-Din and accomplice Ali Atwa, remains on the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

The suspect was being held on the island of Syros but was to be transferred to the Korydallos high-security prison in Athens for extradition proceedings, police said.

With Post wires