Japanese Red Army founder released from prison
The Japanese Red Army, led by Fusako Shigenobu, terrorized the world in the 1970s-80s in the name of the Palestinian cause.
Fusako Shigenobu was sentenced in 2006 in Japan to twenty years in prison.
AFP
Fusako Shigenobu, the founder of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), a movement that sowed terror in the 1970s-80s in the name of the Palestinian cause, was released on Saturday after serving a 20-year prison sentence in Japan .
Aged 76 today, the one who was once nicknamed the “red queen” or “the empress of terror” had been arrested in 2000 in her native country, where she had returned illegally after having lived for thirty years in the Near East. She had proclaimed the dissolution of the ARJ from her prison cell in 2001.
Fusako Shigenobu left the prison where she was detained in Tokyo on Saturday in a black car with her daughter. Thirty of his supporters were present, carrying a banner reading “We love Fusako”, as well as a hundred journalists.
«Excuses»
“It goes back half a century, but our fight, including hostage taking, has caused innocent people to suffer,” Fusako Shigenobu said a few minutes later. “I would like to apologize” for that, she added.
This far-left figure who advocated world revolution through armed struggle was sentenced in 2006 in Japan to twenty years’ imprisonment for having organized a hostage-taking at the French embassy in the Netherlands in 1974 , which had lasted a hundred hours.
This hostage-taking in which Fusako Shigenobu had not directly participated had injured several police officers and forced France to release a member of the ARJ arrested a few months earlier at Paris’ Orly airport.
Autodissolution
Fusako Shigenobu is also suspected of having planned the killing at Lod-Tel Aviv airport (Israel) by an ARJ commando in 1972, a suicide operation with submachine guns and grenades which left 26 dead and nearly 80 casualties among civilians.
Until the late 1980s the ARJ carried out hostage takings, hijackings, bank robberies and attacks on embassies in Asia and Europe. Torn by internal disputes, the organization had gradually lost its strength and influence, until its self-dissolution in 2001.
Japanese police continue to search for seven former members of the ARJ, including Kozo Okamoto, the only survivor of the perpetrators of the massacre at Lod-Tel Aviv airport 50 years ago and who has been granted political asylum in Lebanon.
Posted today at 03:16
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