Lod Airport massacre
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On May 30, 1972 three members of the Japanese Red Army undertook a terrorist attack on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near in Tel Aviv.
Because airport security was focused on the possibility of a Palestinian attack, the use of Japanese terrorists took guards by surprise, and the commitment to a suicide mission simplified planning.
Kozo Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda had been trained at Baalbek, Lebanon. They arrived at the airport aboard an Air France flight from Paris. Dressed conservatively and carrying slim cases they attracted little attention. Entering the waiting area, they produced automatic firearms from their cases and began to fire indiscriminately at airport staff and visitors. They killed twenty-four people and injured seventy-eight others. The victims included sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, and professor Aharon Katzir, an internationally renowned protein biophysicist, whose brother, Ephraim Katzir, would be elected President of Israel the following year. Yasuda and Okudaira died at the scene, Yasuda from Israeli fire and Okudaira by his own hand - he had moved from the airport building onto the landing area, after firing at passengers disembarking from an El Al aircraft and committed suicide using a grenade. Okamoto was severely injured but survived to be tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1972.
In the letter claiming official responsibility for the attack carried out by the Japanese Red Army, the PFLP referred to it as Operation Deir Yassin. This was to portray it as revenge for the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre by Jewish Irgun members on Palestinian civilians in the Deir Yassin village. The letter also stated that the operation was carried out by the Squad of the Martyr Patrick Arguello. Patrick Arguello had been shot and killed two years earlier, on September 6, 1970 on an Israeli El Al jet he had attempted to hijack together with PFLP member Leila Khaled.
Okamoto was released in 1985 with over a thousand other prisoners in an exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. He settled in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. He was arrested in 1997 but in 2000 was granted political refugee status in Lebanon. Four other JRA members arrested at the same time were extradited to Japan.
In June 2006, a legislative initiative by Senator José Garriga Picó,Senate Project (PS) 1535, was approved by an unanimity vote by both houses of the Puerto Rico State Legislative Assembly making every May 30th "Lod Massacre Remembrance Day". On August 2, 2006, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Hon. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, signed it into Law 144 August 2, 2006,"Lod Remembrance Day", making it an official day to commemorate those events, honor both those murdered and those who survived and to educate the Puerto Rican public against terrorism.
Soon to be officially memorialized after 35 years on May 30th 2007, the names of the US Citizens of Puerto Rico murdered at the Lod Airport Massacre are: Reverend Angel Berganzo, Carmela Cintrón, Carmen E. Crespo, Vírgen Flores, Esther González, Blanca González de Pérez, Carmen Guzmán, Eugenia López, Enrique Martínez Rivera, Vasthy Zila Morales de Vega, José M. Otero Adorno, Antonio Pacheco, Juan Padilla, Consorcia Rodríguez, José A. Rodríguez, Antonio Rodríguez Morales.
