Fosaku Shignobo, the founder of the Japanese Red Army, which carried out the assassination of Arman Palestine in the 1970s and 1980s, was released on Saturday after serving a 20-year prison sentence in Japan, according to AFP.
Fusaku, 76, nicknamed the “Red Queen” or “Queen of Terror”, was arrested in her home country in 2000 and returned secretly after living in the Middle East for 30 years, announcing the dissolution of the Japanese Red Company. Army from his cell in 2001.
Shignobo was released from prison in Tokyo in a black car with his daughter Mai, while many of his supporters carried a sign reading “We love Fusaku.”
“I apologize for the inconvenience my arrest caused to many people,” Shignobu told reporters after his release.
“It’s been half a century, but by giving priority to our struggle, like taking civilians hostage, we have hurt innocent people we do not know.”
The far left, which called for a world revolution through armed struggle, was sentenced in 2006 to 20 years in prison in Japan for organizing a 100-hour hostage-taking at the French embassy in the Netherlands in 1974.
The hostage-taking, in which Fusaku Shignobo was not directly involved, injured several police officers and forced France to release a member of the Japanese Red Army.
During the events in The Hague, a grenade attack on the Dragstore Publicis in Paris killed two people and injured 34 others.
Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos, was sentenced to life in prison in September 2021 for the attack.
The Japanese Red Army was close to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Carlos became one of Europe’s armed forces.
Shignobu is believed to have been behind the planned operation at Tel Aviv Load Airport, which killed 26 people and injured about 80 in 1972.
Born into a poor family in post-war Tokyo in 1945, Shignobu was the daughter of a World War II officer who worked as a grocer after the defeat of Japan.
His trip to the Middle East began by accident when he sat down at the University of Tokyo at the age of 20, while Japan witnessed student movements in the 1960s and 1970s to protest the Vietnam War and the Japanese government’s plans to allow it. passed. The US military stays in this country.
Shignobo soon became involved in the leftist movement and decided to leave Japan at the age of twenty-five, leading the international branch of a Japanese revolutionary group that disappeared a few years later and then established the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon. . 1971, received by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
“At first I was neither pro-Arab nor anti-Israel,” Shignobo said in a book to his only daughter, who was born in Lebanon in 1973 and was linked to the People’s Liberation Front (PFLP). .
“But (at that time) the Palestinian cause resonated with us, the youth who opposed the Vietnam War and were thirsty for social justice.”
His daughter, Mai Shignobu, has lived in Japan since 2001 and immediately came to defend and support her mother throughout her detention.
Without acknowledging his involvement in the hostage-taking in The Hague, Fusako Shignobu lamented in prison the armed struggle for the realization of his revolutionary ideals.
“Our hopes were not fulfilled and the end was ugly,” he said in a letter to the Japan Times in 2017.
“I think the Japanese are less concerned about politics now (…) and I think my actions and the actions of others (Japanese revolutionaries) have played a role,” he added.
Until the late 1980s, the Japanese Red Army carried out hostage-taking, hijacking, bank robberies, and attacks on embassies in Asia and Europe.
However, internal disputes eroded the organization, which gradually lost its influence until it was dissolved in 2001.
Japanese police continue to search for seven former members of the Japanese Red Army, including Kozo Okamoto, the only survivor of the Lod airport massacre 50 years ago and political asylum in Lebanon.
Source: Lebanon Debate
