Man on deathbed tells police he's one of Japan's most wanted men and was on the run for 50 YEARS… but dies before proving it

A 70-year-old man revealed to police on his deathbed that he was one of Japan's most wanted fugitives before he died.

The man claimed to be Satoshi Kirishima, a radical extremist behind the capital bombings who had been on the run for 49 years.

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Last week, local police received a tip that he might be sheltering in a hospital not far from Tokyo.

When they questioned the man, he told them that he had been hiding under an alias for decades in Fujisawa City, just an hour's drive from Tokyo.

The man claiming to be Kirishima said he had terminal cancer and wanted to finally admit his real identity before his death.

Apparently he revealed details about the bombings that were previously unknown to police.

Four days after he was interrogated, the old man died on Monday – before police could corroborate his story.

DNA tests conducted on him and relatives of suspect Kirishima were apparently compatible, Japanese newspaper Kyodo News reported.

But police refused to confirm these reports.

However, National Police Bureau chief Yasuhiro Tsuyuki said: “We believe that the man who died in hospital after claiming to be Satoshi Kirishima was actually the suspect.”

Wanted man Kirishima was part of a militant group that repeatedly bombed Tokyo in the 1970s.

He had been studying at university in Tokyo when he joined an extremist left-wing group called the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (EAAJAF).

The group's philosophy supported revolution against the state, was anti-war, opposed to the country's big corporations, and was a symbol of imperialism.

Most of the group's members were arrested by the authorities, but it now appears that the missing Kirishima has evaded them for fifty years.

They carried out several brutal attacks targeting major Japanese companies in the 1970s.

One of the group's attacks was the bombing of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 1974, which killed eight people and injured nearly hundreds of others.

EAAJAF, which was firmly against the war in the Pacific, targeted the company that manufactured weapons.

That year they carried out two more bombings in Tokyo, before seven of them were arrested the following May.

Several of them were sentenced to death.

Kirishima had been in hiding from the police since 1975 and was last heard from in late May when he called his father and said, “I am with three women in Okayama.

“Please prepare money. I'm thinking of running abroad.'

Local media reports said the man told police at the hospital, “I want to use my real name in my last moments,” before claiming to be Kirishima.

As his surreal story unfolded, he explained that he had lived in Fujisawa City for decades under the pseudonym Hiroshi Uchida.

He lived in an old flat near where he worked at a construction company, and even went dancing at a nearby bar once a month.

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