Kozo Okamoto, a Japanese militant involved in an attack that killed more than two dozen people at an airport in Israel in 1972, died near the Lebanese capital, Beirut, on Thursday at 78.
The death was announced by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist militant group behind the attack at the airport near Tel Aviv perpetrated by Mr. Okamoto and two fellow members of an aligned anti-imperialist organization, the Japanese Red Army. Mr. Okamoto had trained with the P.F.L.P. in Lebanon in his youth and was under its protection during his recent decades of exile in the country.
Mr. Okamoto died of a long illness, according to the group, which hailed him as a hero who had long sacrificed for the Palestinian cause.
Mr. Okamoto, an agriculture student in Japan before his militant turn, was the sole survivor of the suicide mission. The trio trained in Lebanon and flew to Canada, New York and Rome, where they picked up weapons. They then traveled to Paris and boarded a flight to Israel with bags full of guns and grenades, according to the Israeli authorities who questioned him in 1972.
Upon their arrival to the Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, the attackers shot indiscriminately around the airport and blew up their grenades. About 17 Puerto Ricans, eight Israelis and a Canadian died and about 80 people were injured.
The attackers were supposed to kill themselves, but Mr. Okamoto, to his regret, he later said, survived after he was tackled in the airport with a grenade in hand. He was brought to trial in Israel and was defiant, expressing no remorse and asking to be put to death. His father, who was deeply apologetic about his son’s actions, wrote to Israeli officials requesting his son’s execution. Israel was reluctant to make a martyr of Mr. Okamoto, however, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Lod Airport was renamed Ben-Gurion International Airport soon after the attack.
In 1985, having spent much of his time in solitary confinement, Mr. Okamoto was released from prison as part of a swap with the P.F.L.P. for Israeli soldiers. Japanese officials objected to his release and sought his return to face justice there, but he was sent with other Palestinian prisoners to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome.
Mr. Okamoto was arrested in Lebanon in 1997 on charges related to his documents, but his incarceration generated an outcry. The best-known of five Japanese Red Army members aligned with the P.F.L.P. imprisoned in the country, Mr. Okamoto was a popular figure, and Lebanese officials felt pressured to resist Japan’s efforts to have him extradited to face justice at home.
The Japanese Red Army was responsible for a string of attacks and airline hijackings, including the 1970 hijacking of a commercial flight from Japan that was diverted to North Korea, a Communist country the hijackers admired, where they received asylum. Among them was Mr. Okamoto’s older brother, Takeshi, who had helped radicalize his younger sibling during his student years in Japan. He was believed to have died in Pyongyang in the mid-1990s.
During his imprisonment in Lebanon, Mr. Okamoto converted to Islam and took the name Ahmad. Left-wing organizations in Beirut took up his cause, protesting his incarceration and potential extradition. Beirut University students maintained a vigil outside the Interior Ministry in the capital, demanding political asylum for Mr. Okamoto. About 20,000 people signed a petition in support of the demand, which was granted in 2000.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, who was a leftist student in Beirut at the time of the protests, said he got to know Mr. Okamoto in the years after his release.
Mr. Abdul-Hussain said Mr. Okamoto became a frequent patron of the Beirut bar, Abou Elie, a hole-in-the-wall communist establishment where Anthony Bourdain filmed a segment in 2015. “Kozo was a daily presence,” he recalled, and they “talked extensively” over several years.
To Mr. Abdul-Hussain and the other young left-wing activists who frequented the bar, Mr. Okamoto was a hero who had “put their money where their mouth was” and took action for what he believed. But Mr. Abdul-Hussain said he had been surprised to find that, although Mr. Okamoto never changed his beliefs, he did not glorify his violence and was disinclined to talk about what he had done.
He smiled often, spoke fluent Arabic and was always surrounded by friends, Mr. Abdul-Hussain said. But as was typical for the left-wing groups of Mr. Okamoto’s era, he did not appear to establish a traditional relationship or family ties.
In a rare 2017 interview from Beirut, Mr. Okamoto told a Japanese newspaper, The Mainichi, that he felt “sorrow for the victims” of the attack but rejected the characterization that it was terrorism, saying the operation was “an armed struggle started jointly with the P.F.L.P.”
Mr. Okamoto was seldom in the public eye in the years before he died. In 2022, he appeared at a P.F.L.P. ceremony in a Beirut cemetery held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the airport attack, but he did not speak.
Shortly before his death, Mr. Okamoto was thrust into the spotlight again after Rima Hassan, a far-left French-Palestinian member of the European Parliament, was charged in France this spring with glorifying terrorism after quoting him on social media as saying: “I dedicated my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”
Fusako Shigenobu, the founder of the Japanese Red Army, noted Mr. Okamoto’s passing on social media on Thursday, thanking “the successive Lebanese governments that granted him asylum” and calling him “a fighter who pioneered early Japanese volunteer efforts in solidarity with Palestine.”
