Takeshi Okudaira, Yasuyuki Yasuda, and Kozo Okamoto were suicidal members of the Japanese Red Army, willing to kill for the Palestinian cause. After being trained by Abu Hassan’s group in Lebanon, the three men were dispatched to Lod.
Okudaira, Yasuda, and Okamoto ostensibly drew little attention when they arrived at the Lod Airport on an Air France flight from Paris. Dressed in business suits, the college-aged kids carried musical instrument cases as a disguise. Inside the cases were semi-automatic machine guns, which once retrieved from the baggage claim were used in the attack.
The Japanese terrorists fired into the crowd, cutting down a group of Puerto Rican tourists visiting the Holy Land and killing sixteen of them. They threw grenades into packs of terrified people seeking shelter. One of the gunmen ran out onto the tarmac and began shooting passengers coming off a flight.
When it was over, a total of 26 people were dead. Eighty were injured. Israel changed the airport’s name to the Ben-Gurion International Airport and began a security system based on behavior profiling.
The system works. Fourteen years later, the case of Anne Marie Murphy — prevented by Israeli security agents from boarding an El Al flight with seven pounds of explosives — makes the point. The pregnant, fair-skinned Murphy, who is Irish, was profiled and deemed suspicious. During secondary screening, agents discovered Semtex concealed in the lining of her bag. Without knowing it, the former chambermaid had been given a bomb by her terrorist boyfriend, a Jordanian named Nizar Hindawi, who was not on the flight. Hindawi was the father of Murphy’s unborn child.
