was a member of the armed

militant group The Militant Group was an early British Trotskyist group, formed in 1935 by Denzil Dean Harber, former leader of the entrist Marxist Group in the ILP, as a separate entrist group inside the Labour Party. Initially known as the Bolshevik-Leni ...

the

Japanese Red Army The was a militant communist organization active from 1971 to 2001. It was designated a terrorist organization by Japan and the United States. The JRA was founded by Fusako Shigenobu and Tsuyoshi Okudaira in February 1971 and was most active i ...

(JRA). He attended Keio University, but dropped out in 1970. Later he worked for a time as an assistant for

Kōji Wakamatsu was a Japanese film director who directed such ''pinku eiga'' films as and . He also produced Nagisa Ōshima's controversial film ''In the Realm of the Senses'' (1976). He has been called "the most important director to emerge in the pink film ...

's ''Wakamatsu Productions'', a producer of leftist movies.

Attacks

French Embassy attack

Haruo Wakō and two other members of the JRA ( Junzo Okudaira and Jun Nishikawa) were directly involved in the seizure of the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974. The ambassador and ten other people were taken hostage. After lengthy negotiations, the hostages were freed in exchange for the release of the jailed JRA member Yatsuka Furuya, $300,000 and the use of a Boeing 707 airplane, which flew the hostage-takers to Syria. Syria did not consider hostage taking for money revolutionary, and forced them to give up their ransom which was passed on to the French embassy.

AIA building attack

In August 1975, Wakō and other members of the JRA seized the American Insurance Associates (AIA) building which housed several embassies, including the US Embassy in

Kuala Lumpur , anthem = ''Maju dan Sejahtera'' , image_map = , map_caption = , pushpin_map = Malaysia#Southeast Asia#Asia , pushpin_map_caption = , coordinates = , sub ...

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

, taking over 50 hostages. Both seizures resulted in the successful demand for release of six fellow members (including Jun Nishikawa) of the JRA from imprisonment in Japan and a flight to Libya. The hostages included the United States

consul Consul (abbrev. ''cos.''; Latin plural ''consules'') was the title of one of the two chief magistrates of the Roman Republic, and subsequently also an important title under the Roman Empire. The title was used in other European city-states throu ...

Robert Stebbins and the Swedish chargé d'affaires

Fredrik Bergenstråhle Johan Fredrik Göstasson (Gson) Bergenstråhle (23 September 1926 – 10 February 2005) was a Swedish diplomat. Early life Bergenstråhle was born on 23 September 1926 in Stockholm, Sweden the son of Colonel Gösta Bergenstråhle and his wife Gret ...

and his secretary.

Prison

In May 1997, Wakō was imprisoned with five other suspected JRA members in Lebanon on charges of forgery before four of them were

deported Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term ''expulsion'' is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation ...

to Jordan in March 2000, the fifth, Kozo Okamoto, was granted asylum for health reasons. As the Jordanian authorities refused to allow Wakō into

Jordan Jordan ( ar, الأردن; tr. ' ), officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,; tr. ' is a country in Western Asia. It is situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, within the Levant region, on the East Bank of the Jordan Rive ...

. Wakō and the three other suspected JRA members were handed over to Japan to be tried on

terrorism Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...

charges. On 23 March 2005 a Japanese court, presided over by Judge Kunihiko Koma, sentenced Haruo Wakō to life in prison. The court dismissed prosecutors' arguments over the

conspiracy A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between persons (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason, especially with political motivation, while keeping their agre ...

charge.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wako, Haruo 1949 births Living people Japanese people imprisoned abroad Japanese Red Army Prisoners and detainees of Lebanon People extradited from Jordan People extradited to Japan Japanese prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by Japan Japanese communists People from Shiogama, Miyagi