Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [102]
On 30 May 1972 an Air France jet landed at Israel’s Lod airport after a final stopover at Rome on its long flight from Puerto Rico. It was 10 p.m. before the passengers, many of them Baptist and Pentecostal pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, entered the hall to retrieve their baggage. No one paid much attention to three young Japanese men, Takeshi Okidoro, Yasuiki Yashuda and Kozo Okamoto, none of these names being the ones on their passports, which by now had no photographs either, as they lifted three fibreglass cases from the conveyor belt.
Instead of exiting through customs, they laid the cases on the floor and withdrew grenades and Czech VZI-58 submachine guns. They raked the baggage hall with gunfire, pausing to toss grenades amid their fellow passengers. The hall filled with smoke, noise, screams and the pungent reek of cordite. The pilgrims’ leader, Reverend Manuel Vega, saw his wife shot dead before a sharp pain hit him in the chest. Fortunately for him, what would have been a fatal bullet lost propulsion as it passed through his pocket Bible. Twenty-four people were killed, and a further seventy wounded, before Yashuda was accidentally shot by one of his comrades and Okidoro blew his own head off with a hand grenade that exploded prematurely as he tried to throw it through the luggage aperture to the parking bays. Only Okamoto attempted to escape via the airport runways, throwing grenades at stationary planes as he weaved past, before a brave El Al employee managed to floor him. During interrogations - which yielded a response from the silent Japanese only when the Israelis (falsely) promised to supply him with a revolver and a bullet to commit suicide - Okamoto shed some light on how he and his Rengo Sekigun (Japanese Red Army) comrades had decided to turn an airport into a charnel house, with spidery channels or long splashes of blood between corpses and abandoned luggage.
The son of a primary school head and a teacher, Okamoto had studied agriculture at a minor college, quickly becoming disillusioned with the ‘mere masturbation’ of student politics with silly posters of Che Guevara on the college dorm walls. He followed his elder brother Takeshi into the Red Army, his first task being to screen to students a movie entitled Declaration of World War by the Red Army and PFLP. In September 1971 he went to Beirut for military training. In early summer 1972 the PFLP put him through a more rigorous programme including handling explosives, the last three days being devoted to the layout of Lod airport. He then embarked on a sightseeing trip to Europe with his two comrades, the cover needed for them to board the Air France jet as it made its final stop at Rome from Puerto Rico. In keeping with the bizarre, cultic character of the Red Army, whose chief casualties hitherto had been members sexually abused, tortured and done to death by their comrades, Okamoto made several Delphic utterances about desiring to become a star within Orion, the fate he wished to share with his victims. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Okamoto eventually converted to Judaism, using nail clippers to perform a botched circumcision that nearly killed him. He currently lives somewhere in Lebanon after his release from prison in 1985 as part of a hostage exchange involving three captured Israeli soldiers who were swapped for 1,150 Palestinians.
Responses to this attack varied. In Japan, where the father of another terrorist had been so ashamed that he hung himself, Okamoto’s own father wrote the following