The 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague was an attack and siege on the French Embassy in The Hague in the Netherlands starting on Friday 13 September 1974. Three members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) stormed the embassy, demanding the release of their member Yatsuka Furuya. The ambassador and ten other people were taken hostage. The siege and negotiations lasted five days, resulting in the release of Furuya, the embassy hostages and a safe flight out of the Netherlands for the terrorists. During the incident, a café in Paris was bombed which was linked to the embassy crisis.
The Japanese Red Army was a communist terrorist organisation dedicated to eliminating the Japanese government and monarchy and launching a worldwide revolution. The organisation carried out many attacks and assassinations in the 1970s, including the Lod Airport massacre in Tel Aviv three years earlier. [1]
Three Japanese Red Army members stormed the embassy on Friday 13 September 1974. A few minutes later, three Dutch police officers entered the embassy and were immediately caught under fire. Two police officers were seriously injured due to the gunfire and the other opened fire. [2] One of them was policewoman Hanke Remmerswaal, who was shot in the back, puncturing a lung.
The Red Army demanded the release of their member Yoshiaki Yamada (also known as Yatsuka Furuya), one million dollars, as well as the use of a French aeroplane. Due to the position of the building in a central part of the city (Smidsplein), the Dutch authorities, in consultation with the Government of France, chose to negotiate for the release of the hostages instead of mounting a rescue operation. [3]
The two female hostages were released after two days.
Le Publicis Drugstore bombing | |
---|---|
Location | Saint‐Germain‐des‐Pres, Paris, France |
Date | 15 September 1974 |
Attack type | Grenade attack |
Deaths | 2 |
Injured | 34 |
Perpetrators | Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine |
On 15 September, a grenade was thrown into the Le Publicis Drugstore café in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in Paris. The attack killed two people and wounded 34, including two children who were maimed. [4] The attack was linked to the still ongoing siege and hostage-taking at the French embassy in The Hague. [5]
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) claimed responsibility for the attack, and in 1996 a former member of the group, Carlos the Jackal, was charged with the attack. [6] The hostage-taking by the PFLP-allied JRA in The Hague had also been orchestrated by Carlos according to prosecutors. The Paris attack was said to have finally pressured the French government into releasing the jailed JRA member. Carlos personally claimed responsibility for the attack in a 1979 interview with an Arab magazine, which he later denied. [5]
After lengthy negotiations, around 10:00 am on Tuesday 17 September, France agreed, in return for the release of the hostages, to free Furuya from a French prison, US$300,000, in addition to a flight out of the Netherlands in an Air France-owned Boeing 707, which would later take off with the four terrorists and a Dutch-English crew piloted by Pim Sierks from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. The plane flew the hostage-takers to Aden, South Yemen for refueling, before bringing them to Damascus, Syria. They were then forced to give up their ransom and weapons, which were then returned to the French Embassy in Damascus. [7]
According to Ambassador Jacques Senard, at least 20 shots were fired by the terrorists during the siege. Both the captives and Dutch authorities claimed that the kidnappers were highly trained; the ambassador called the group's leader a "skilled negotiator". [8]
The Government of France said on 18 September that its secret service would organise an international effort against the Japanese Red Army. [8]
The Dutch Budget Day (Dutch: Prinsjesdag ), where the reigning monarch addresses Parliament and proposes the next year's budget, was scheduled for 17 September. The traditional ride in the Golden Coach did not happen. Instead Queen Juliana was driven in a car, along a heavily protected route. [3]
The JRA's next major activity was the August 1975 AIA building hostage crisis in Malaysia.
Kazue Yoshimura was arrested by Peruvian DIRCOTE agents in Lima on 25 May 1996 after alleged contacts with members of the Maoist Shining Path (SP) insurgency. [9] The trace to her arrest was established after the 1995 Bucharest capture of Yukiko Ekita with a false Peruvian passport. She had supposedly intended on traveling to the coca-growing Huallaga Valley, the last stronghold of the diminished Peruvian Maoist insurgency as well as a drug-trafficking haven. [10] According to the Peruvian Caretas magazine, she was aiming on helping establish a JRA presence in South America and may have even established contacts with Jun Nishikawa, another JRA operative later captured in Bolivia. Yoshimura was later deported to Japan by the government of Alberto Fujimori (a Japanese Peruvian), who stated that there was no proof against her despite the overwhelming intelligence data. The move was allegedly the result of pressure from Japanese authorities. In December 1997, Yoshimura was sentenced to two and half years imprisonment for passport forgery. [11]
Two of the three members who allegedly attacked the embassy, Haruo Wakō and Nishikawa were detained and extradited to Japan, where they were later imprisoned.[ citation needed ]
The other member, Junzō Okudaira, is still at large.[ as of? ] Fusaku Shigenobu was captured by the Japanese police on 8 November 2000, after many years on the run. She was found guilty of her involvement in the attack and sentenced in 2006 to 20 years in prison. [12] [13]
Carlos the Jackal faced trial for the Paris café attack in 2017, and was given a third life sentence. During the trial he claimed that "no one in the Palestinian resistance has executed more people than I have," and claimed responsibility for a total of about 80 killings. [14] [15] It is thought he bombed the café to put more pressure on the French government into the JRA's demands in Netherlands. Carlos had already been imprisoned since 1996 for other international terrorist activities. [16]
This event was featured in the 2010 biopic miniseries Carlos about the terrorist Carlos the Jackal. In the film The Assignment the attack is fictionalized as one Carlos launched specifically to kill a CIA agent who he recognized incidentally while at the cafe there, disconnected from the French Embassy attack.
The Japanese Red Army was a militant communist organization active from 1971 to 2001. It was designated a terrorist organization by Japan and the United States. The JRA was founded by Fusako Shigenobu and Tsuyoshi Okudaira in February 1971, and was most active in the 1970s and 1980s, operating mostly out of Lebanon with PFLP collaboration and funding from Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, as well as Syria and North Korea.
The Lod Airport massacre was a terrorist attack that occurred on 30 May 1972. Three members of the Japanese Red Army recruited by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO), attacked Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and injuring 80 others. Two of the attackers were killed, while a third, Kōzō Okamoto, was captured after being wounded.
The Iranian Embassy siege took place from 30 April to 5 May 1980, after a group of six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy on Prince's Gate in South Kensington, London.
Kōzō Okamoto is a Japanese communist and member of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), responsible for the massacre of 26 passengers at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Israel.
Japan Air Lines Flight 472 was an aircraft hijacking carried out by the Japanese Red Army (JRA) on 28 September 1977.
The Japanese embassy hostage crisis began on 17 December 1996 in Lima, Peru, when 14 terrorist members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took hostage hundreds of high-level diplomats, government and military officials and business executives. They were attending a party at the official residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru, Morihisa Aoki, in celebration of Emperor Akihito's 63rd birthday. Although the crisis took place at the ambassadorial residence in San Isidro rather than at the embassy proper, it is often referred to as the "Japanese embassy" hostage crisis.
Operation Chavín de Huántar was a military operation in which a team of 142 commandos of the Peruvian Armed Forces ended the 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis by raiding the Japanese ambassador's residence and freeing the hostages held there by the terrorist organization Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). It is considered one of the most successful hostage rescues in history.
Haruo Wakō was a Japanese communist militant, member of the Japanese Red Army (JRA).
The West German Embassy siege in Stockholm, Sweden, was a hostage standoff initiated by the Red Army Faction (RAF) on 24 April 1975. Collectively, the attackers referred to themselves as Kommando Holger Meins, after Holger Meins, an RAF member who had died of starvation during a (collective) hunger strike in Wittlich Prison on 9 November 1974.
The AIA Building hostage crisis took place at the AIA Building in Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 5 August 1975. The Japanese Red Army took more than 50 hostages at the AIA building, which housed several embassies. The hostages included the United States consul and the Swedish chargé d'affaires. The gunmen won the release of five imprisoned terrorists and flew with them to Libya.
On 6 February 1974, Palestinian militants occupied the Japanese embassy in Kuwait City, taking the ambassador and ten others hostage. The militants' motive was to support the Japanese Red Army members and Palestinian militants who were holding hostages on a Singaporean ferry in what is known as the Laju incident. Ultimately, the hostages were released, and the guerrillas were allowed to fly to Aden.
Fusako Shigenobu is a Japanese communist activist, writer, and the founder and leader of the now-disbanded militant group Japanese Red Army (JRA).
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal or simply Carlos, is a Venezuelan who conducted a series of assassinations and terrorist bombings from 1973 to 1985. A committed Marxist–Leninist, Ramírez Sánchez was one of the most notorious political terrorists of his era, protected and supported by the Stasi and the KGB. After several bungled bombings, Ramírez Sánchez led the 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) headquarters in Vienna, during which three people were killed. He and five others demanded a plane and flew with a number of hostages to Libya.
Carlos, also known as Carlos the Jackal, is a 2010 French-German biographical film and television miniseries about the life of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, nicknamed Carlos the Jackal, covering his first series of attacks in 1973 until his arrest in 1994. It premiered as a three-part TV mini-series on French pay channel Canal+, with the three parts airing on May 19, May 26, and June 2, 2010. On the same day it premiered on Canal+, the full 5½-hour version was also shown out of competition at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
Jun Nishikawa is a former member of the Japanese Red Army (JRA).
On 21 December 1975, six terrorists attacked the semi-annual meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna, Austria; the attackers took more than 60 hostages after killing an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC security officer, and a Libyan economist. Several other individuals were wounded. The self-named "Arm of the Arab Revolution" group was led by Carlos the Jackal. The siege resulted in complex diplomatic negotiations. It ended two days later, after flights to Algiers and Tripoli, with all the hostages and terrorists walking away from the situation. The fact that this was one of the first times that Arab states were targeted by terrorists also led to them being more cooperative in developing antiterrorism efforts at the United Nations.
Paris attacks may refer to the following:
Henderikus "Pim" Sierks was a Dutch military and airline aviator who most notably captained a Boeing 707 full of hostages and hostage takers during the 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague.
On 13 and 19 January 1975, El Al aircraft at Paris-Orly Airport, France were subject to attempted RPG attacks by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorists led by Carlos the Jackal. While the intended attacks failed, collateral damage was suffered and the second attack resulted in gunfighting and a seventeen-hour hostage situation.