Ex-Japanese Red Army member imprisoned over Jakarta attack dies at 76

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Tsutomu Shirosaki, a former militant in the Japanese Red Army, died Saturday while in prison for his involvement in a 1986 mortar attack on the Japanese Embassy in Jakarta, investigative sources said. He was 76.

Shirosaki died after choking during a meal, the sources said Sunday.

In 2018, the Tokyo High Court upheld a lower court ruling that sentenced him to 12 years in prison for conspiring with a person to fire two mortars toward the embassy in the Indonesian capital.

Shirosaki was one of the members of the now-disbanded Japanese Red Army who was earlier released from jail in Japan in exchange for hostages from a Japan Airlines jetliner hijacked by the radical group in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka in 1977.

He was captured in Nepal in 1996 and sent to the United States where he was sentenced to 30 years in prison over a separate 1986 rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. He was released from jail in 2015 after proving to be a model inmate.

The same year, Shirosaki was deported from the United States and arrested on his return to Japan by Tokyo police.