The septuagenarian was the emblematic figure of the terrorist group, rallied to the Palestinian struggle, which committed a series of deadly attacks in the 1970s and 1980s.
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With the Liberation, Friday, May 28, of Fusako Shigenobu who was the face of the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun), terrorist group who committed a series of deadly attacks around the world in the years 1970-1980 , turns a page in the history of “lead years”.
She is an elderly woman (76 years old), her face hidden by a mask, wearing a large black hat and a bouquet of flowers in her hands that left the Hachioji medical penitentiary center in Tokyo with her daughter . Thirty former activists were present as well as a hundred journalists. “Our half-century old fight made innocent people suffer and for that I apologize,” she said.
Until his arrest in Osaka, in November 2000, Fusako Shigenobu had been the most sought after terrorist by Interpol, terrified somewhere in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. Sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in February 2006, that which the Japanese press baptized the “queen of the Red Army” was the emblematic figure of the “funeral generation”, born on the surc of the student movement, which launched into the armed struggle. A drift also embodied by the Italian red brigades and the Baader band, in the former Western Germany. 2> “Our hopes have turned into a tragedy”
The woman with hollow cheeks and graying hair, cut in the boy, returned in 2000 to Japan in the hope of relaunching the movement in the archipelago, was no longer the young student with enigmatic beauty and face Maked long hair whose photo had appeared for three decades in police stations and Japanese immigration offices.
Fusako Shigenobu, who did not participate in the attacks perpetrated by the Red Army, was sentenced during her trial for organizing a hostage taking at the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974 – during of which three police officers were seriously injured. While acknowledging that she had not participated directly in this operation, nor in others, the court did not consider it less that it was the instigator as “central figure of the terrorist group”.
At the statement of the judgment, she had raised her fist in the direction of a dozen sixties sympathizers who had taken place in the courtroom. In a written message, she had nevertheless expressed her regrets: “Faced with the judges, I felt the eyes of our victims and my fellow fell on me while fighting.” In April 2001, she announced the dissolution of the group. Then, in an interview written at the Japan Times in 2017, she recognized: “Our hopes of revolution were not affected and turned into a tragedy.”
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