March 3, 1970: First action linked to the Japanese Red Army (JRA) when nine terrorists calling themselves the Red Army Faction and led by Takeshi Okamoto, JRA core-member Kozo's elder brother, and Takamaro Tamiya, force a Japanese airliner to fly to North Korea where they are still based.
August 1971 to February 1972: The 'Massacre of the Innocents', in which 14 members of the United Red Army are tortured and killed by their leaders at a villa north of Tokyo. Two policemen and a bystander are killed in the shootout that ends the siege.
May 31, 1972: In the first trans-national attack, three JRA members working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, kill 26 people and wound 76, mostly Latin American pilgrims, at Lod airport in Israel. Tsuyoshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda are killed and Kozo Okomoto is captured and sentenced to life imprisonment, but freed in 1985.
July 20, 1973: A Japan Air Lines jumbo jet is hijacked from Amsterdam and flown to Libya where it is blown up on the runway at Benghazi.
January 31, 1974: JRA terrorists fail to blow up an oil storage depot in an attack in Singapore. They then hijack a ferry, holding out until flown out of the country. No one is hurt.
February 6, 1974: In a linked raid, Palestinian terrorists seize the Japanese embassy in Kuwait to force the release of the JRA group trapped in Singapore.
July 26, 1974: Yoshiaka Yamada is arrested at Orly airport carrying US$10,000 which was to be used by the JRA to finance a series of kidnappings. Most of the notes turn out to be poor counterfeits.