DNA tests confirm death of Japan radical wanted for decades

DNA analysis has confirmed that a 70-year-old man who confessed on his hospital deathbed last month to being one of Japan’s most-wanted fugitives was indeed the suspect, police said yesterday.

Satoshi Kirishima, a former member of a Japanese radical leftist group behind deadly bomb attacks in the 1970s, was wanted for nearly 50 years, with his bespectacled, smiling mugshots almost omnipresent outside police stations across Japan.

The saga took a sudden twist last month when a terminally ill man hospitalised near Tokyo declared on his deathbed that he was Kirishima – prompting hospital staff to alert police – only to die a few days later.

Through subsequent DNA analysis, “the person who died at the hospital on January 29 was confirmed to be Satoshi Kirishima himself ”, a Tokyo police spokesman told AFP yesterday.

With his identity now verified, “we sent five case files (involving him) to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office today”, the spokesman said.

In one of those five cases, Kirishima allegedly helped plant a homemade bomb that blasted away parts of a building in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district in April 1975.

While interrogated by police shortly before his death, Kirishima recounted details about his family and the extremist group that only he could have known, according to local media.

A young Kirishima was a member of the East Asia AntiJapan Armed Front, which in the 1970s orchestrated a series of fatal bomb attacks on corporate behemoths, including one at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries that killed eight people.

— AFP file photo This picture taken in a train station of Chuo district in Tokyo shows a poster of Satoshi Kirishima, who was a member of The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, a radical leftist organisation responsible for bombing attacks in Japan’s capital in the 1970s.