Again the Red Army

For cold-blooded determination and brutal efficiency, few terrorist organizations can match the Japanese extremists who call themselves the Red Army. In the past five years the Red Army has hijacked planes, attacked embassies and murdered dozens of innocent people in various parts of Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Its most infamous exploit was the wanton slaughter of 26 tourists at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in June 1972. Last week in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, five Red Army members stormed a 14-story downtown office building where more than 1,000 people were at work. Spraying gunfire around the ninth floor, the site of a U.S. passport office and the Swedish embassy, the terrorists wounded three guards and seized 53 hostages, among them the American consul and the Swedish charge d'affaires.

Soon after the takeover, they tossed a three-page typewritten memo out of a window, threatening to blow up the building unless seven cronies jailed in Japan were released. Malaysian officials quickly rejected the use of force. The lives of the hostages, announced Prime Minister Abdul Razak, were of the "greatest importance." Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Miki, on a state visit to Washington, agreed. Awakened just after 2 a.m. in his suite at Blair House, he quickly overruled reluctant officials in Tokyo and instructed them to fly the seven prisoners to Kuala Lumpur aboard a Japan Air Lines DC-8.

Though two of the prisoners refused to go, the remaining five were quickly flown to Kuala Lumpur's Subang International Airport. Complications developed when Malaysian officials could find no country willing to accept the terrorists. Iran even threatened to shoot down the plane if it overflew the country with hijackers aboard. As negotiations continued, a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise sent 60 servings to the hostages. Finally, word came that Libya, a well-known supporter of radical movements, would take the ten men. The five terrorists, prodding U.S. Consul Robert Stebbins and 14 other hostages with pistols, boarded a bus for the airport. There they waited a further 25 hours before exchanging the 15 men for four Japanese and Malaysian officials who went as substitute hostages on the flight to Tripoli. Upon arrival, the ten radicals surrendered peacefully.

Public Debut. Japanese police believe the Kuala Lumpur attack was masterminded by Fusako Shigenobu, 29, the daughter of an insurance salesman, who is suspected of being the Red Army's leader. The Red Army, numbering about 30 and dedicated to violent revolution, made its public debut in March 1970, when nine members hijacked a Japan Air Lines jet to Pyongyang, North Korea. Two years later, just before the Lod Airport massacre, authorities uncovered the bodies of 14 young men and women on remote Mount Haruna, 70 miles northwest of Tokyo. The 14, who had been tortured and left to die of exposure in freezing winter temperatures, had apparently been purged for displaying "bourgeois symptoms."

With the Red Army's latest coup, Japanese authorities fear that other fanatic groups will intensify their activities. The police already claim to have evidence that terrorists will try to block Emperor Hirohito's scheduled October visit to the U.S.

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