Notorious Japanese fugitive dies after 50 years on the run
Long hair, youthful smile, thick glasses slightly askew: for decades, the blackand-white photo of one of Japan’s most wanted fugitives has been a ubiquitous sight at police stations nationwide.
But after nearly 50 years Satoshi Kirishima – wanted over deadly bombings by leftist extremists in the 1970s - reportedly died Monday, days after local media said he had finally been caught.
Last week, the 70-year-old revealed his identity after he admitted himself to hospital under a false name for cancer treatment, according to Japanese media.
The reports were a sensation in Japan, where his young face is so widely recognised that it has inspired viral Halloween costumes.
But police were still scrambling to conduct DNA tests when the man believed to be Kirishima passed away on Monday morning.
“Investigators looked into and eliminated past tips, but there is a very high possibility that this individual is actually Kirishima,” a police source told the Asahi newspaper.
Details are emerging of how Kirishima may have been hiding in plain sight for decades.
Born in Hiroshima in January 1954, Kirishima attended university in Tokyo, where he was attracted by radical far-left politics.
He joined the East Asia AntiJapan
Armed Front, one of several militant groups active in the era along with the oncefeared Japanese Red Army or the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany.
The revolutionary Armed Front carried out bombings at Japanese companies, including one at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries that killed eight people.
It operated in three cells, with fanciful names: “Wolf”, “Fangs of the Earth” and “Scorpion” -- Kirishima’s outfit.
Alongside physical descriptors on Kirishima’s wanted posters -- 160 cm tall (5 ft 3), full lips, very short-sighted -- is a summary of his crime.
In April 1975, the young radical allegedly helped set up a bomb that blasted away parts of a building in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district. No one was killed.
He has been on the run ever since.
TV Asahi and other outlets said he had lived a double life for years, working at a building contractor in the city of Fujisawa in Kanagawa region, under the alias Hiroshi Uchida.
He was paid in cash and went under the radar with no health insurance or driving licence, the reports said.
At the nondescript office where the man reportedly worked, someone who knew him told TV Asahi that the suspect had “lost a lot of weight” compared to the wanted photo.