Massacre at Lod Airport
The massacre at Lod Airport is a terrorist attack on May 30, 1972 at Tel Aviv International Airport (now Ben Gurion Airport ), in which members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) murdered 26 people and injured dozen others on behalf of the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP . The three Japanese terrorists were trained in Baalbek , Lebanon.
Course of the attack
The terrorists reached the airport on board an Air France plane from Paris via Rome . Since the security authorities at the airport expected attacks by Palestinian terror groups, the three Japanese did not attract much attention. The members of the group carried violin cases with them in which they held sawn-off Czech assault rifles of the Samopal vz. 58 hid. As soon as the group reached the waiting area, they randomly opened fire on airport staff and travelers. 26 people were killed and dozen injured. Among the victims were 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico and the internationally recognized physical chemist Aharon Katzir (also Katzir-Katchalsky), the brother of the later President of Israel Ephraim Katzir . One of the assassins named Yasuyuki Yasuda was shot dead by Israeli security forces. Another assassin, Tsuyoshi Okudaira - the sham husband of the JRA founder Fusako Shigenobu - killed himself with a hand grenade in the course of the attack .
aftermath
The Japanese public initially reacted with disbelief to reports that the perpetrators of the mass murder were Japanese, until an employee of the Japanese embassy confirmed this information after visiting Kōzō Okamoto , the third assassin in the hospital. Okamoto was sentenced to life in prison. In its propaganda, the PFLP disguised the massacre as revenge for the Deir Yasin massacre in 1948 and named it Operation Deir Yassin in a letter of confession . The terrorist group was referred to in the letter as the group of the martyr Patrick Arguello . Patrick Argüello was shot dead by Israeli Sky Marshals in 1970 while attempting to hijack a passenger plane belonging to the Israeli airline El Al together with the PFLP terrorist Leila Chaled .
Okamoto and over a thousand other prisoners were exchanged for Israeli soldiers in 1985. He settled in Lebanon . He was arrested by the Lebanese government in 1997 for visa violation under Japanese pressure. Four other members of the Japanese Red Army were extradited to Japan, but Okamoto was granted "political refugee" status by the Lebanese government in 2000.
In 2006, the day of the massacre was officially established by law in Puerto Rico as the annual memorial day for the victims.
In Palestine, too, the event is commemorated in a special way: 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.
Individual evidence
- ^ BBC report of May 29, 1972, accessed August 8, 2014
- ↑ taz of May 26, 2012 , accessed on August 8, 2014
- ↑ Abbas's Fatah praises 1972 Lod airport terror attack , TOI of May 19, 2016
literature
- William Andrews: The Japanese Red Army Faction, bahoe books, Vienna 2018, pp. 87ff