Kozo Okamoto’s life should have ended in 1972 when he took part in a suicide attack on Israel’s Lod Airport that killed 26 people.
Yet half a century and two stints in prison later, he is still alive, leading an uneventful existence as Lebanon’s first and only political refugee.
Now a frail, gray-haired man, Kozo Okamoto is still wanted in his native Japan, but remains something of a folk hero in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.
Photo: AP
When he boarded the Air France flight from Rome on May 30, 1972, the name he was given by the Japanese Red Army (JRA) on his fake passport was Daisuke Namba, a man who tried to assassinate Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923.
However, Ahmad was the nom de guerre he went by in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the leftist organization that trained him and planned the attack for the JRA.
Prior PFLP hijackings had led to increased passenger screening by airlines, but inspection of check-in luggage was still rare.
Photo: AFP
Kozo Okamoto and his two accomplices passed through immigration untroubled at what is now the high-security Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv.
They picked up their baggage from the carousel, whipped out assault rifles and grenades to sow carnage around them.
Among the 26 killed were one Canadian and eight Israelis.
All 17 others were Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. To this day, a remembrance ceremony is held every May 30 in San Juan.
The massacre was planned as a suicide attack and all three Japanese militants had intended to mutilate their faces with their grenades to make identification more difficult.
Two of them died, but Okamoto was wounded and captured.
By the time he was released as part of a massive prisoner exchange in May 1985, Okamoto was not dead, but he seemed barely alive.
“When he was released, he looked like a corpse,” said Abu Yusef, a PFLP official in Beirut who provides for Okamoto’s needs, from accommodation to food and health care.
Okamoto had spent much of his Israeli jail time in solitary, forced to eat from the ground like a dog, with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to the PFLP.
Long after his release, Abu Yusef told AFP in an interview, he would still lean over the table and finish his plate by licking it clean.
After years in JRA camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Okamoto was arrested in 1997 on forgery charges.
Under pressure from Tokyo, four other JRA members were extradited in 2000, but Okamoto was released and granted asylum after weeks of demonstrations by pro-Palestinian groups.
He has since lived in the care of the PFLP, whose influence has dwindled since its terrorist operations made headlines decades ago, but still treats Okamoto with the respect owed to elders.
His minders used to give him little bundles of eight cigarettes three times a day but the 74-year-old quit smoking recently.
He eats his meals at set times and spends hours watching Tom and Jerry or other cartoons on television.
Okamoto lives in semi-hiding, with limited knowledge of the outside world.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS