Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese terrorist who helped carry out the 1972 Lod Airport massacre that killed 26 people in Israel, has died in Beirut at 78, according to reports on Thursday.
The terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said Okamoto, a member of the radical Marxist leftist terrorist organization Japanese Red Army, had lived in Lebanon since his release from Israeli prison in the 1985 Jibril Agreement prisoner exchange with the PFLP General Command. Israel released 1,150 terrorists in exchange for three Israelis captured during the 1982 First Lebanon War.
Okamoto carried out the massacre on behalf of the PFLP at Terminal 1 of the airport (renamed Ben-Gurion International Airport in 1973) along with two other Japanese terrorists after they arrived aboard an Air France flight from Rome. They picked up their luggage containing assault rifles and grenades and opened fire. In addition to the fatalities, 80 people were wounded in the attack.
The dead were 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, a Canadian citizen and eight Israelis, including protein biophysicist Aharon Katzir, head of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and a likely front-runner in the upcoming Israeli presidential election. His brother Ephraim Katzir was elected president the following year.
His accomplices, Tsuyoshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda, died in the attack and Okamoto was wounded, detained and later sentenced to life in prison.
