Kōzō Okamoto

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Kōzō Okamoto ( Japanese 岡本 公 三 , Okamoto Kōzō ; * December 7, 1947 ) is a former Japanese terrorist .

Life

On May 30, 1972, he took part in a joint attack by the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion Airport ) in Tel Aviv . This terrorist attack is also known as the Lod Airport massacre .

In the attack, three Japanese students shot into the crowd with submachine guns and threw hand grenades. They killed 26 civilians and wounded dozens. Okamoto was the only one of the group who survived. An Israeli court sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Several Palestinian organizations subsequently tried to free him by taking terrorist hostages. For example, in 1972 when Munich was taken hostage by the organization Schwarzer September , in 1973 in the hijacking of a Japan Airlines jumbo jet by the Japanese Red Army and the PFLP-EO ( Haddad Group), in 1976 in the hijacking of an Air France passenger plane Entebbe by the PFLP-EO and in 1978 during the coastal road attack by eleven Fatah fighters who had reached Israel by sea from Lebanon and who killed 37 Israelis in a violent hostage-taking.

In 1985, Okamoto was released through a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PFLP-GC and initially traveled to Libya . From there he later moved to Lebanon , where he settled in the Bekaa plain . In 1997 he was arrested and threatened with deportation to Japan, whose government had put him under an international wanted man's notice. The Lebanese judiciary sentenced him to three years' imprisonment for forging the travel documents which he used to enter Lebanon. In 2000 the Lebanese government granted him political asylum . He had previously converted to Islam and taken the first name Ahmad .

In 2016, the Palestinian ruling party, Fatah, offered "a thousand greetings" to the "hero of the operation at Lod Airport" and "Comrade Okamoto". Fatah spokesman Munir Jaghob said that they are proud of all those who have stood up for the cause of Palestine.

literature

  • William Andrews: The Japanese Red Army Fraction, Bahoe Books, Vienna 2018, pp. 88–96, pp. 127–142
  • Aileen Gallagher: The Japanese Red Army pp. 24-26 The Rosen Publishing Group, 2003 ISBN 0-8239-3823-9
  • Patricia G. Steinhoff: Portrait of a Terrorist in: Asian Survey, Vol. 16, No. 9 (Sept. 1976), pp. 830-845

Movies

  • Rabih El-Amine: Ahmad the Japanese: Lod - Roumie - Tokyo. Documentation, Lebanon 1999, 18 minutes.
  • Masao Adachi: The Prisoner / Terrorist. Feature film, Japan 2007, 113 minutes.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Moshe Brilliant: Israeli Officials Say Gunmen Intended to Seize Hotel. In: New York Times of March 13, 1978 (English)
  2. ↑ John F. Burns: Lebanon Grants Political Asylum to 1 of 5 Japan Terrorists. In: New York Times of March 18, 2000, accessed November 5, 2018.
  3. ↑ John F. Burns: Fate of 5 Terrorists Hangs Between Japan and Lebanon. In: New York Times of March 17, 2000 (English)
  4. ↑ Abbas's Fatah praises 1972 Lod airport terror attack , TOI of May 19, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Okamoto, Kōzō
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 岡本 公 三 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese terrorist
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1947