The Israeli daily Ha’Aretz relates a “strange story” that of the attack perpetrated almost half a century ago at Israel’s largest international airport in the name of the Palestinian resistance. Strange, because “the story of the Lod airport massacre [l’actuel aéroport Ben-Gourion] started far from the Middle East and without any connection to it”. It actually starts thousands of kilometers away, in Japan.
In 1969, Japanese anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist militants created the Red Army Faction (FAR, Sekigun-ha), which would become famous a year later with the hijacking of a plane on March 31, 1970 at Tokyo airport towards North Korea, which will cause no casualties. The FAR finally fell a year later after numerous arrests in its ranks. Fusako Shigenobu, one of “key members”then co-founded the Japanese Red Army (ARJ).
In 1972, “feeling the police getting dangerously close to her”, Shigenobu flies to Lebanon, “which was then the Mecca of terrorist organizations”. Other ARJ members who made the same trip some time earlier formed ties with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Together, they prepare the first of twenty terrorist actions that the Japanese small group will commit in the 1970s and 1980s around the world, relates Ha’Aretz.
“The group flew to Frankfurt and then to Rome, where they bought tickets for an Air France flight to Tel Aviv. They aroused no suspicion when they landed at Lod airport at 10 p.m. […] When their suitcases arrived, they opened them, took out machine guns and grenades and opened fire. Within two minutes, they had killed 26 people and injured 80 others.”
When the three attackers ran out of ammunition, “one was killed, the second committed suicide and the third, injured Kozo Okamoto, was arrested outside the arrivals hall as he tried to flee”.
Since this tragedy, airports around the world have tightened passenger screening.
free today
Tried by an Israeli court, Kozo Okamoto was sentenced to life imprisonment, then released in Libya in 1985, thanks to an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners. He then moved to Syria. In 1997, he was arrested in Lebanon for entering the territory illegally. But, three years later, the Lebanese authorities granted him political asylum. Now 74 years old, he lives in Beirut and leads a “quiet life”.
Wanted for decades, Fusako Shigenobu was arrested in 2000 in Japan, where she managed to enter under an assumed name after living clandestinely in the Middle East. Sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2006, she was released on May 28 in Tokyo.
