Agencies-Gaza post
Kozo Okamoto’s long life after suicide mission in Israel
Kozo Okamoto’s life was supposed to end in 1972 when he took part in suicide aggression at Israel’s Lod airport that killed 26 people. Yet half a century and two jail terms later, he is still alive, leading a peaceful 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.
When he boarded the Air France flight from Rome on May 30, 1972, the name given to him by the Japanese Red Army (JRA) on his fake passport was Daisuke Namba, a man who attempted to assassinate Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923.
But Ahmad was the nom de guerre he went by to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the leftist organization that trained him and planned the attack for the JRA.
Previous PFLP hijackings had led to greater scrutiny of passengers by airlines, but checked baggage inspection was still rare.
Kozo Okamoto and his two accomplices made it through immigration smoothly at what is now Ben Gurion’s maximum-security airport near Tel Aviv.
They gathered their bags from the merry-go-round and took out assault rifles and grenades to wreak havoc around them. Among the 26 killed were a Canadian and eight Israelis.
All the other 17 were Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. To date, a commemoration ceremony is held in San Juan every May 30.
The massacre was planned as a suicide attack and all three Japanese militants intended to mutilate their faces with their grenades to make identification more difficult. Two of them died but Okamoto was wounded and captured.
In detention, he was duped by his side of a deal he would make with an Israeli general, under which he would provide information in exchange for a weapon with which to kill himself during his high-profile trial, he consistently aimed for the death penalty, a punishment Israel has only implemented once – against Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
“Okamoto was working for the prosecution,” so said his court-appointed Israeli lawyer, according to a 1976 interview with academic Patricia Steinhoff eventually, he was sentenced to life in prison.
When he was released as part of a massive prisoner swap in May 1985, Okamoto was not dead but he barely looked alive.
In an AFP photo taken at Libya’s Tripoli airport, his eyes are glassy in a dull stare as Palestinian fighters lift him onto their shoulders in triumph, “When he was released, he looked like a dead body,” said Abu Yusef, a PFLP official in Beirut who provides Okamoto’s needs, from housing to food and health care.
According to the PFLP, Okamoto had spent much of his time in Israeli prison in solitary confinement, forced to eat off the ground like a dog, with his hands cuffed behind his back long after his release, Abu Yusef told AFP in an interview, he would still lean on the table and finish his plate by licking it.
After years in JRA camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Okamoto was arrested in 1997 on charges of forgery.
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 under the care of the PFLP, whose influence has waned since his terrorist operations made headlines decades ago, but he still treats Okamoto with the respect due to the elders of a bygone era.
Okamoto made a rare public appearance on Monday to commemorate its 50th anniversary.
PFLP militants accompanied him to a cemetery on the edge of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut.
During a short wreath-laying ceremony for the two JRA commandos who died when he didn’t, he smiled at the cameras, showed a V-sign, and was escorted back.
Born the youngest of six children in a southern Japanese middle-class family, Okamoto did not have a particular connection to the Palestinian cause as he grew up, but “to this day, he talks about Palestine and rejects the occupier,” Abu Yusef said.
However, without travel documents, Kozo Okamoto led a quiet life. His assistants gave him small packs of eight cigarettes three times a day, but the 74-year-old quit smoking recently. Okamoto eats his meals at set times and spends hours watching “Tom and Jerry” or other cartoons on television.
He lives semi-hidden, with limited knowledge of the outside world. “It won’t be a threat to Israel or Japan,” said May Shigenobu, daughter of JRA founder Fusako Shigenobu, who was released Saturday after 20 years in a Japanese prison.
“But the Japanese still ask for his extradition every year, so there is attention on him despite his physical and mental condition,” he told AFP. “I can’t ignore the possibility that his life is still in danger,” said Shigenobu, who grew up in Lebanon and is familiar with Okamoto’s situation.
Source: Arab News
