The man who claimed at the end of January on his deathbed to be Satoshi Kirishima, a former member of a small Japanese far-left group on the run for nearly 50 years, was telling the truth, the police confirmed to AFP on Tuesday. Tokyo.
DNA analyzes
“made it possible to confirm that the person who died in hospital on January 29 was Satoshi Kirishima
,” a Japanese police spokesperson told AFP.
“I want to live my last moments under my real name
,” he explained shortly before his death in a hospital near Tokyo, where he had registered under another identity.
Aged 70, he suffered from terminal stomach cancer.
Former member of a revolutionary organization
The black-and-white photo of Satoshi Kirishima with his youthful smile, thick glasses and long hair had been displayed for decades on the walls of police stations across Japan.
In the early 1970s, he was part of the Anti-Japanese East Asian Armed Front, a far-left revolutionary organization that carried out bombings against major Japanese companies.
One of these attacks, in 1974 at the headquarters of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries company in Tokyo, left eight people dead and many injured.
Most of the members of the small group had been arrested in May 1975, but Kirishima had escaped this dragnet and the police had never found his trace.
He was suspected of having detonated a homemade bomb in Tokyo in April 1975, without causing any casualties.
According to local media, Kirishima worked under a false name for a construction company southwest of Tokyo for decades.