Police on Saturday searched 19 locations in five prefectures for evidence that Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu traveled between Japan and foreign countries on forged passports, the charge for which she was served a fresh arrest warrant Friday.
A joint investigative squad made up of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and Osaka Prefectural Police, which served the latest arrest warrant on Shigenobu, 55, seized a total of 468 items -- including personal computers, floppy disks and newsletters -- from the homes of Shigenobu's supporters in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Osaka and Hyogo prefectures, police said.
The search was the second in connection with forged passports since the arrest last month in Osaka Prefecture of Shigenobu, who has already been indicted on charges stemming from her alleged masterminding of the 1974 seizure of the French Embassy in The Hague.
According to police, Shigenobu obtained a forged passport around November 1997 and another around March this year and used them to travel between Japan, China and other countries between around December 1997 and September this year, in violation of the Passport Law.
Shigenobu, the founder of the Japanese Red Army and a key figure in a series of international terrorist incidents in the 1970s, was arrested outside a hotel in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture, on Nov. 8.