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Jail for Japanese Red Army hijacker

Tanaka
Tanaka hijacked a Japan Airlines plane in 1970  


TOKYO, Japan -- An ex-member of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for the 1970 hijacking of a plane to North Korea.

The Tokyo District Court sentenced Yoshimi Tanaka to prison for hijacking a domestic Japan Airlines Boeing 727 carrying 129 people on March 31, 1970, a court spokeswoman told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Witnesses said Tanaka and other Red Army members wielded samurai swords and carried a bomb during Japan's most infamous hijacking.

The flight, bound for the southwestern city of Fukuoka, was forced to fly to South Korea where all the passengers were freed.

It then flew to North Korea, where the Red Army members defected. The crew members were eventually released.

During his trial, the 53-year-old Tanaka pleaded guilty to the charges and apologized to the passengers.

Aside from hijacking, Tanaka was also accused of kidnapping, forcibly carrying passengers across international borders and robbery.

'Extremely malicious'

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Judge Masazo Ogura said Tanaka's actions, aimed at destroying social order, were extremely malicious.

"It shocked society and gave the passengers and their families immeasurable physical and psychological pain and fear," he said in his ruling.

Tanaka is one of nine Japanese Red Army members accused in the hijacking, but is the only one to be convicted.

Three of Tanaka's alleged accomplices later died in North Korea. Five remain there, though one may also have died, according to Japan's National Police Agency.

The crime, the first in Japan, prompted the government to enact an anti-hijacking law setting a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for the crime.

World revolution

Tanaka was also accused of helping to start a riot in a separate attack on a Tokyo police station in 1969.

In 1996, he was arrested in Cambodia with more than $120,000 worth of fake 100 U.S. dollar bills.

Tanaka was attempting to flee Cambodia to Vietnam in a North Korean Embassy car accompanied by North Korean diplomats, according to police.

He was arrested in June 2000 when he was extradited to Japan from Thailand.

The Red Army was formed in the late 1960s and advocated "simultaneous world revolution."

Its members have been accused of bombings and attacks on embassies and airports in Japan and abroad.

In 1972, 24 people were killed at Israel's Lod airport in an attack blamed on the group.

In 2000, the group's founder Fusako Shigenobu was apprehended in western Japan after more than 25 years underground.



 
 
 
 






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