'We'll disband': Japanese terror group

The Japanese Red Army, a revolutionary group responsible for terrorist massacres in Israel and Italy, will disband nearly four decades after it was formed, newspapers have reported in Tokyo.

A statement released by the group said it planned to re-form as a ‘‘legal’’ organisation.

Fusako Shigenobu, the Red Army’s founder who was arrested last November in Japan after more than 25 years on the run, ordered the dissolution, the group said in a statement.

‘‘This will be the last statement from the Japanese Red Army,’’ it added.

In a letter sent from jail, Shigenobu, 55, reportedly informed her followers last month that she would break up the group to try to pursue its cause through legal channels.

The group said the dwindling number of supporters and the loss of many top officials - who either have left or been arrested - in recent years forced its decision.

‘‘We will promote ourselves under a different name next year,’’ the group’s statement was reported as saying.

The dissolution brings to an end the Japanese Red Army’s campaign to foment a worldwide communist revolution, which began when the group formed in Lebanon in the late 1960s.

The Red Army carried out a string of high-profile terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s, including a 1972 machine-gun and grenade assault on the international airport outside Tel Aviv, Israel, which killed 24 people and injured 80.

Shigenobu’s husband died in the counterfire.

In 1988, the group bombed a United States officers’ club in Naples, killing five people, including an American.

The Red Army also teamed up with Lebanese guerrillas in 1973 to hijack a Japan Airlines jet over the Netherlands, and it blew up an oil refinery in Singapore in 1974.

Shigenobu has been charged with taking hostages in a 1974 attack on the French Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands.

At the opening of her trial last month in Tokyo, Shigenobu pleaded guilty to charges of entering Japan on forged passports but said she was innocent in the 1974 attack.

At least six leading Red Army members from the 1970s remain at large, according to Japanese police.