Three Explosions in the Heart of Jakarta

SHUNSUKE Kikuchi, a young man from Yokohama, Japan, was deeply distressed. Although it had been more than a year, his visit to India in 1984 still left him with some problems. On that trip, his bag and money went missing along with his passport.

Far away in Jakarta, Edi Kosasih, a driver for the Canadian Embassy, had zero worries when he parked his Toyota Corona at Wisma Metropolitan, where the Canadian Embassy office was located. Just a moment later, a sedan with the police number B 1897 XG parked near his car.

At around 12.35pm, the sedan exploded. The fire caught Edi's arm. Two young people nearby, who were about to park their car, were also burned. Six people were injured and six cars were damaged. The sedan from which the explosion came was completely destroyed.

That incident on May 14, 1986 suddenly confused the police. A few minutes earlier, there were failed terror attempts in two different places in Jakarta. At 11:55, it happened near the east entrance of the Jakarta Fair arena which was targeting the United States (US) Embassy on Jalan Merdeka Selatan. Meanwhile, another one happened at 11:20 targeting the Japanese Embassy, which happened almost simultaneously with a fire in room number 827 of the President Hotel on Jalan Thamrin.

Jakarta was under attack!

A clue was obtained from room number 827 of the President Hotel, from which police found a rocket launcher and a passport in the name of Shunsuke Kikuchi.  

ABRI Commander General Benny Moerdani immediately reported to Bina Graha. The next day, he gave a statement asking the public to remain calm while increasing vigilance. He concluded that the series of terror could not have been carried out by one person. “There must be someone helping. Maybe he was paid, or for another other reason,” he said, as quoted by Kompas May 16, 1986.

The government couldn't yet confirm which group or country was behind the terror. However, he didn't deny the involvement of the Japanese. “Yes... particularly the Japanese,” said Moerdani.

Meanwhile in Japan, Kikuchi panicked. “The incident in Jakarta embarrassed me because I have never been to Indonesia,” said Kikuchi as quoted by Kompas.

The Japanese police were also at sixes and sevens. At night, a few hours after the Jakarta terror attack, the Japanese news agency Kyodo in Tokyo received a call from an unknown man who claimed to be responsible for the terror acts in Jakarta. He also admitted that he was a member of the Anti-Imperialist International Brigade (AIIB).

The investigation revealed that AIIB was actually an alias for the Japanese Red Army (JRA), a group in Japan that spread terror throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s.

A Child of the Cold War

The formation of the JRA was inseparable from the Cold War which pitted the capitalist bloc against the communist bloc. In Japan, the communists continued to organize resistance to the world that, in their view, was full of injustice.

More militant resistance emerged after the Korean War and Joseph Stalin's sharp criticism of the Japanese Communist Party of Japan (JCP) for choosing to fight through parliament. Militants within the JCP, mostly students, formed a radical new group.  

“The students were increasingly dissatisfied with what they perceived as the Japanese Communist Party's failure to take revolutionary action,” Stephen Atkins wrote in Encyclopedia of Modern Worldwide Extremists and Extremist Groups.

In 1957, they formed the Nihon Kakumeiteki Kyosansugisha Domei or Japan Revolutionary Communist League. After the League split, some of its members founded new organizations.

In September 1969, Fusako Shigenobu, a student of Meiji University, and several other activists founded Sekigun-ha or Red Army Faction (RAF) which declared war on the state. On March 31, 1970, the RAF hijacked a Japan Airlines plane and forced the pilot to land the plane in Pyongyang. Together with the Keihin Anti-Treaty Joint Struggle, the RAF briefly formed the United Red Army (URA) but disbanded after the arrest of their leader. Shigenobu and some of his friends then founded the Japanese Red Army (JRA).

Fusako expanded his organization's reach to the Middle East and adopted terrorism as a form of resistance. He later moved the JRA headquarters to Lebanon. There, in the Bekka Valley, JRA members were given technical training in terror operations from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) led by Wadi Haddad. Terrorist acts were carried out targeting Israel, the United States, and other Western countries.

On May 30, 1972, several JRA members shelled the arrivals terminal of Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing approximately 24 people and injuring 80. More JRA terror followed during the 1970s and 1980s.

Japan, their home country, wasn't spared.

On May 4-6, 1986, Tokyo hosted the G7 Summit which included seven advanced industrial countries. At that event, several international issues were discussed, including terrorism.  

The JRA regarded the summit as a manifestation of the arrogance of the new colonizers. During the Economic Summit Meeting, they fired five rockets at the government guest house where some guest delegates were staying. Fortunately, none of the rockets hit their targets, and the summit went ahead as scheduled.

In addition to condemning international terrorism, the summit produced several agreements on terrorism. These included not exporting weapons to countries that sponsor or support international terrorism and limiting, even closing, diplomatic and consular missions and other official bodies in countries involved in terrorism.

The decision infuriated the JRA, who planned retaliation.

Terror in Jakarta

Shortly after the G7 Summit in Tokyo, one of the JRA members arrived in Jakarta. He booked a room at the President Hotel using the name Shunsuke Kikuchi and got room number 827, from which he could clearly see the Japanese Embassy building. Only Thamrin Street separated the two buildings. The hotel was also only a few blocks from the US Embassy.

After a week in Jakarta, he began to carry out his plan. Around lunchtime, he picked up a long piece of metal he had constructed himself and brought it to the window of his room. He aimed the portable rocket launcher at the Japanese Embassy building. As soon as Shirosaki pulled the trigger, the rocket launched and hit the 4th floor of the Japanese Embassy building. However, the rocket failed to explode. Shortly after, a car bomb exploded at the Wisma Metropolitan.

After that series of attacks, the man set fire to his hotel room to remove traces and then ran away.  

Arriving police put out the fire, found a homemade rocket launcher and a passport in the name of Shunsuke Kikuchi. The police immediately put his name on the wanted list. Immigration also tightened the entry and exit points of Soekarno-Hatta Airport, Cengkareng. Each passport was scrutinized to make sure the photo matched the owner's face.

Japanese police suspect that the attack in Jakarta was carried out by the same group at the G-7 Summit. A similar thing was conveyed by the Head of State Intelligence Coordinating Agency Yoga Soegama. “Such activities with the same pattern also occurred in the middle of the Tokyo Summit in early May. The shooting method was also very similar,” said Soegama, as quoted by Kompas, May 17, 1986.

Foreign Minister Mochtar Kusumaatmadja met and coordinated with US Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz and Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Shinichi Yanai. He stated the Indonesian government was trying as hard as possible to find the perpetrators and provide the best possible security protection to foreign representatives, especially from countries meeting at the G7 Summit in Tokyo.  

A vital clue was uncovered a week later. Police identified the perpetrator's fingerprints from a can and a lamp in room 827, pointing to Tsutomu Shirosaki. Japanese police immediately declared that Shunsuke Kikuchi, whose passport was used by the terrorist, was not involved.  

A search and chase was then launched to catch the real culprit, Tsutomu Shirosaki. Yet, Shirosaki was nowhere to be found.

The End of the Adventure

Tsutomu Shirosaki, then 38 years old, was a former member of the JRA. In 1971, he was involved in a bank robbery. After being caught, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, his friends came to his aid.  

In 1977, in Bombay, JRA members hijacked a Tokyo-bound JAL plane and forced the pilot to land the plane in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Around 159 passengers were taken hostage. As ransom, the hijackers demanded that the Japanese government pay six million dollars and release nine JRA prisoners, including Shirosaki. At the request of the JRA, the nine prisoners were flown to Algeria, which was also the power base of the PFLP, its ally.

From Algeria, Shirosaki made contact with Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, who was furious and wanted revenge for the US airstrikes on his country. The JRA was asked to execute attacks on the US and the West. "The JRA therefore used the alias Anti-Imperialist International Brigades (AIIB),” the Handbook of Terrorism in the Asia-Pacific states. “AIIB launched its first attack in June 1986 which targeted the American and Japanese embassies in Jakarta.”

Before terrorizing Jakarta, Shirosaki was involved in the bombing of a pub in Berlin that was a regular gathering place for US Navy soldiers, and also in the firebombing of a guest house in Tokyo during the G-7 summit.

After the Tokyo stunt failed, he carried out a terrorist act in Jakarta using a fake passport. It was unclear where he got the passport, why he chose Indonesia as a target, and who he associated with while in Indonesia.

“The JRA's activities in the 1980s were random and ineffective,” Allen Gallagher wrote in The Japanese Red Army.

From Jakarta, Shirosaki reached South Asia and lived on the move in various countries in the area. From there, he continued to commit acts of terror. For instance, in June 1987, he was involved in the bombing of the US Embassy in Rome, Italy.

He became an Interpol target, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continued to pursue him.

Shirosaki's adventure eventually came to an end. His whereabouts were discovered when he contacted some of his friends by phone. On September 21, 1996, he was arrested by Nepalese police in cooperation with the FBI and was then brought by FBI agents to the US.

Shirosaki was tried in a Colombian district court on two charges: assault on US interests and terrorism. He was found guilty and spent 20 years in prison in Yazoo City, Missouri.

In February 2015, Shirosaki was freed but only temporarily. He was brought to Japan to stand trial for his terrorist act against the Japanese Embassy in Jakarta. Despite denying his involvement with the alibi of being in Lebanon at the time of the incident, the Tokyo District Court sentenced him to 12 years in prison in November 2016.

Unlike the US and Japan, the Canadian government did not demand that Shirosaki be tried in their country with no clear reason. What is certain is that, with the US and Japanese sentences alone, Tsutomu Shirosaki has spent and will spend his old years in prison.

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