The man who claimed on his deathbed in late January that he was Satoshi Kirishima, a former member of a small Japanese far-left group on the run for almost 50 years, was telling the truth, police confirmed to AFP on Tuesday. Tokyo.
DNA analysis “made it possible to confirm that the person who died in hospital on January 29 was Satoshi Kirishima,” a Japanese police spokesman told AFP.
“I want to live my last moments under my real name,” he said shortly before his death in a hospital near Tokyo, where he had registered under a different identity. At the age of 70, he suffered from terminal stomach cancer.
The black-and-white photo of Satoshi Kirishima, with his youthful smile, thick glasses and long hair, hung on the walls of police stations across Japan for decades.
In the early 1970s, he was part of the East Asian Anti-Japanese Armed Front, a far-left revolutionary organization that carried out bombings against major Japanese companies.
One of these attacks in 1974 at the Tokyo headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries killed eight people and injured many.
Most of the members of the small group had been arrested in May 1975, but Kirishima had escaped this trap and the police had never found his trail.
He was suspected of detonating a homemade bomb in Tokyo in April 1975, without causing any deaths.
According to local media, Kirishima worked for decades under an assumed name for a construction company southwest of Tokyo.