Kozo Okamoto (center) at the 50th anniversary, held in Beirut on may 30, 2022, of an attack carried out by members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) at Lod-Tel Aviv Airport. (Credit: Joseph Eid/AFP)
Kozo Okamoto, who carried out a deadly attack on an Israeli airport on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, died in Beirut on Thursday aged 78, the group said.
In a statement, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) mourned "militant comrade Kozo Okamoto... who passed away today" in Beirut's southern suburbs.
The statement praised Okamoto, whose nom de guerre was Ahmad al-Yabani (Ahmad the Japanese), and his "enormous sacrifices that spanned long decades in the fields of struggle alongside the Palestinian cause."
He was part of a three-man commando from the Japanese Red Army (JRA) that killed 26 people on May 30, 1972, at Lod airport — now known as Ben Gurion — near Tel Aviv in an attack planned by the PFLP.
Those killed in the massacre, which was planned as a suicide attack, were eight Israelis, a Canadian, and 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico.
The other two Japanese attackers were killed but Okamoto was wounded and captured, and eventually sentenced to life in prison in Israel.
By the time he was released as part of a massive prisoner exchange in May 1985, he was not dead but he seemed barely alive.
On an AFP photo shot at Tripoli airport in Libya, his eyes were glazed into a dull stare as Palestinian fighters hoisted him on their shoulders in triumph.
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.
He then spent years in JRA camps in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley, before being arrested in 1997 on forgery charges.
He avoided extradition to Japan and in 2000 was granted asylum in Lebanon after weeks of demonstrations by pro-Palestinian groups.
He had since lived in the care of the PFLP.
In recent years, the frail, grey-haired man lived in semi-hiding, making occasional public appearances at a Beirut cemetery for commemorations of the two JRA militants who died.
Still wanted in his native Japan, he has remained something of a folk hero in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps.
The Marxist-Leninist PFLP carried out a string of plane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s and is banned as a terror group by the United States and the European Union.
It once attracted left-wing militants from across the world including, from Venezuela, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal.
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