Tokyo: A man who claims to be a suspect involved in a series of bombings against companies in Japan in the 1970s worked under the name “Hiroshi Uchida” at a building contractor in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, for decades, investigative sources said Sunday.
Suspecting that the name is fictitious, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department is rushing to confirm the man’s identify through a DNA test and other methods.
The man identified himself as Satoshi Kirishima, a 70-year-old suspect wanted in the serial bombing case for about half a century, after he was hospitalized for terminal stomach cancer earlier this month.
According to the sources, the man worked as a live-in employee at the building contractor in the city of Fujisawa in Kanagawa for decades. As he used the name Hiroshi Uchida, the building contractor was apparently unaware of the possibility of the man being the bombing suspect.
When the man first visited the hospital where he is currently staying in the city of Kamakura in Kanagawa, accompanied by a colleague of his, he did not have with him a health insurance card or any other ID. Although he initially told the hospital that his name was Uchida, he later called himself Satoshi Kirishima, saying, “I want to face the end with my real name.”
The Public Security Bureau of the MPD has been questioning the man since Thursday. He can communicate but is in a serious condition.
Kirishima, a member of a radical group behind the serial bombings, was put on the wanted list in May 1975 on suspicion of violating the explosives control law by planting up and detonating a homemade bomb at a building in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district in April that year.
JIJI Press