Haruo Wakō

Haruo Wakō (和光 晴生, Wakō Haruo, born 1949 in Shiogama in Miyage prefecture) was a member of the armed militant group, the Japanese Red Army.

He studied in Keio University and dropped out in 1970. He worked for a time as an assistant to the producer of leftist movies.

Haruo Wakō and two other members of the JRA were involved in the seizure of the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974. The ambassador and ten other people were taken hostage and a Dutch policewoman, Hanke Remmerswaal, was shot in the back, puncturing a lung. After lengthy negotiations, the hostages were freed in exchange for the release of a jailed Red Army member (Yatsuka Furuya), $300,000 and the use of a plane. The plane flew the hostage-takers first to Aden, South Yemen, where they were not accepted and then to Syria. Syria did not consider hostage taking for money revolutionary, and forced them to give up their ransom.

In 1975, Wakō and other members of the JRA seized the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Both seizures resulted in the successful demand for release of six fellow members (among others fellow French embassy hostage taker Jun Nishikawa) of the JRA from imprisonment in Japan.

In May 1997, he was imprisoned in Lebanon on charges of forgery yet was sent to Jordan. As the Jordanian authorities refused to allow him into Jordan, he was handed over to Japan.

On 23 March 2005 a Japanese court, presided by Judge Kunihiko Koma, sentenced Haruo Wakō to life in prison, after he and three fellow Japanese Red Army members were extradited to Japan from Jordan in March 2000. In Wako's case, the court dismissed prosecutors' arguments over the conspiracy charge.

External links

• The Institute for Counter-Terrorism article