Freed Red Army Leader Fusako Shigenobu Admits The JRA Failed in Aims

ALBAWABA - Making headlines is Fusako Shigenobu. Her name is all over the social media with images and comments. She has been in prison for 21 years.

Everyone is writing about Shigenobu, leader if the Japanese Red Army which made headlines in the 1970s and early 1980s for attempting to spread global socialism. 

AFP writes Shigenobu who is 76-year-old female founder of the once-feared Japanese movement, walked free from prison Saturday after completing a 20-year sentence for a 1974 embassy siege.

One on the social media said: The Red Army founder is a pro-Palestinian activist and is known for her fight against imperialism and capitalism and had been imprisoned on charges she denied in 2000. 

Shigenobu was one of the world's most notorious women during the 1970s and 1980s, when her radical leftist group carried out armed attacks worldwide in support of the Palestinian cause, the French news agency points out. 

Shigenobu left the prison in Tokyo in a black car with her daughter as several supporters held a banner saying "We love Fusako". "I apologise for the inconvenience my arrest has caused to so many people," Shigenobu told reporters after the release. AFP reported. 

The social media is buzzing with her hip release 

"It's half a century ago... but we caused damage to innocent people who were strangers to us by prioritising our battle, such as by hostage-taking," she said as reported by AFP.

She is believed to have masterminded the 1972 machine gun and grenade attack on Tel Aviv's Lod Airport, which left 26 people dead and injured about 80, the news agency added, stating the former soy-sauce company worker turned militant was arrested in Japan in 2000 and sentenced to two decades behind bars six years later for her part in a siege of the French embassy in the Netherlands.

She stayed in the Middle East for 30 years before going to Japan.

Shigenobu has a daughter May, born in 1973 whose father was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),  maintains her innocence over the siege, in which three Red Army militants stormed into the French embassy, taking the ambassador and 10 other staff hostage for 100 hours.

She announced the Red Army's disbanding from prison in April 2001, and in 2008 was diagnosed with colon and intestinal cancer, undergoing several operations. She said on Saturday she will first focus on her treatment and explained she will not be able to "contribute to the society" given her frail condition.

"I want to continue to reflect (on my past) and live more and more with curiosity," she told reporters, and in  a letter to a Japan Times reporter in 2017 she admitted the group had failed in its aims.

"Our hopes were not fulfilled and it came to an ugly end," she wrote and as quoted by AFP.