TOKYO: According to police on Tuesday, DNA testing has verified that the 70-year-old man who admitted to being one of Japan’s most-wanted fugitives on his hospital deathbed last month was, in fact, the suspect.
For almost fifty years, Satoshi Kirishima, a former member of a radical leftist group in Japan that carried out deadly bomb attacks in the 1970s, was on the run. His smiling, bespectacled mug photographs were practically always seen outside police stations throughout the country.
Last month, the story took an unexpected turn when a seriously ill person in a hospital outside of Tokyo claimed to be Kirishima on his deathbed. This led hospital officials to notify the authorities, and the patient passed away a few days later.
According to a Tokyo police spokeswoman, “the person who passed at a hospital on January 29 was determined to be Satoshi Kirishima himself” after additional DNA testing.
Now that his identification has been established, the spokesman stated, “we sent five proceedings (which includes him) over to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office today.”
