Police served a fourth arrest warrant Tuesday on Fusako Shigenobu, founder of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group, on suspicion of falsifying an official document to obtain a passport for a friend in 1974, police said.
Shigenobu, who founded the once powerful terrorist organization in 1971, allegedly submitted a passport application to a Tokyo passport office in April 1974 for group member Junzo Okudaira using his photo but the name of another man, police said.
Shigenobu, 55, allegedly masterminded the falsification, which involved Okudaira, 51, and four others, police said. The four include Mariko Yamamoto, 60, a Japanese Red Army member extradited from Lebanon in March 2000.
Okudaira, still at large, is a brother of Shigenobu's late husband, Tsuyoshi, who died in the group's 1972 attack on Tel Aviv's Lod airport, now Ben Gurion airport, which left 25 people dead.
Tsuyoshi Okudaira was also a member of the Lebanon-based Japanese Red Army.
Japanese police believe Junzo Okudaira was involved in the Japanese Red Army's 1974 seizure of the French Embassy in The Hague and the 1975 seizures of the U.S. and Swedish embassies in Kuala Lumpur, in which the group demanded the release of jailed colleagues.
The police claim Shigenobu's passport fraud helped Junzo Okudaira leave Japan in May 1974 to join Shigenobu and other members in Lebanon.
Shigenobu was arrested in November in Osaka Prefecture and has since been indicted on charges including masterminding the 1974 embassy seizure.
Japanese Red Army members have allegedly been involved in other terrorist incidents mainly in the 1970s, such as the 1977 hijacking of a Japan Airlines jet over India in which they received $6 million in ransom from the Japanese government, according to police.