Beirut, Lebanon: Kozo Okamoto’s life should have come to an end in 1972 when he participated in a suicide attack on Israel’s Lod airport that killed 26 people.
Yet after half a century and twice incarcerated, he is still alive, leading an uneventful existence as Lebanon’s first and only political refugee.
Now a frail, gray-haired Kozo Okamoto is still wanted in his native Japan, but remains like a folk hero in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon.
When he boarded an Air France flight from Rome on May 30, 1972, the name given to him on his fake passport by the Japanese Red Army (JRA) was Daisuke Namba, a man who assassinated Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923. had tried to do.
But Ahmed was a popular name in the Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the left-wing organization that trained him and planned attacks for the JRA.
Earlier PFLP hijacking had led to an increase in passenger screening by airlines but check-in baggage inspection was still rare.
Kozo Okamoto and two of his accomplices went through immigration without much hassle at the now high-security Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv.
They picked up their belongings from the carousel, fired assault rifles and grenades to sow carnage around them.
One Canadian and eight Israelis were among the 26 killed.
All the other 17 were Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. To this day, a remembrance ceremony is held every 30 May in San Juan.
The massacre was planned as a suicide attack and the three Japanese militants intended to mutilate their faces with their grenades to make identification more difficult.
Two of them died but Okamoto was injured and captured.
While in custody, he was reportedly forced out of his side of a deal with an Israeli general, whereby he would provide information in exchange for a weapon that would allow him to kill himself.
During his high-profile trial, he was relentlessly outraged for the death penalty, a punishment Israel only imposed once – against Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
“Okamoto was working for the prosecution,” according to a 1976 interview by academic Patricia Steinhoff, as his court-appointed Israeli lawyer put it.
He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.
By the time he was released in May 1985 as part of a larger prisoner exchange, Okamoto was not dead, but seemed to be barely alive.
In an AFP photo shot at Libya’s Tripoli airport, his eyes twinkle in a dull gaze as Palestinian fighters hoist him over their shoulders.
“When he was released, he looked like a corpse,” said Abu Yousef, a PFLP officer in Beirut who provides Okamoto’s needs, from housing to food and health care.
According to the PFLP, Okamoto spent most of his Israeli prison time in solitary confinement, forced to eat from the ground like a dog, his hands behind his back.
Not long after his release, Abu Yousef told AFP in an interview, he would still lean on the table and finish licking his plate clean.
After years in JRA camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Okamoto was arrested in 1997 on counterfeiting charges.
Under pressure from Tokyo, four other JRA members were extradited in 2000, but Okamoto was released and granted asylum after weeks of demonstrations by pro-Palestinian groups.
He has since remained under the care of the PFLP, whose influence has waned since its terrorist campaigns came into the limelight decades ago, but still treats Okamoto with the respect of elders from a bygone era.
Okamoto made a rare public appearance on Monday to mark the 50th anniversary.
PFLP militants took him to a cemetery on the side of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut.
During a brief wreath-laying ceremony for two JRA commandos, when he did not die, he smiled at the cameras, showed a V-sign and was taken back.
Born as the youngest of six children to a middle-class family in southern Japan, Okamoto had no particular connection to growing up in Palestine.
But “to this day, he speaks of Palestine and denies annexation,” Abu Yousef said.
However, without travel documents, Kozo Okamoto has led a quiet life.
His brains used to give him small bundles of eight cigarettes three times a day, but the 74-year-old recently quit.
Okamoto eats his meals on schedule and spends hours watching “Tom and Jerry” or other cartoons on TV.
He lives in semi-hidden with limited knowledge of the outside world.
“He is not going to be a threat to Israel or Japan,” said May Shigenobu, daughter of JRA founder Fusako Shigenobu.
“But the Japanese are still seeking his extradition every year, so he is being looked after, regardless of his physical and mental condition,” she told AFP.
“I cannot rule out the possibility that his life is still in danger,” said Shigenobu, who grew up in Lebanon and is familiar with Okamoto’s situation.