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Japan's Red Army Group Claims Responsibility for U.S. Attacks
AMMAN, Sept 12 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An anonymous caller to a Jordanian newspaper claimed responsibility for the spate of attacks in U.S. against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on behalf of Japan's Red Army group to "avenge the dead of Hiroshima", news agencies reported Wednesday.
"An anonymous caller speaking Arabic like a foreigner claimed responsibility for the attacks in a call to our newspaper," the editor of
Al-Wahdeh weekly, Fakhri Kawar, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"He said the attacks were carried out to avenge the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," attacked with nuclear bombs by the United States in August 1945 during World War II.
Japan marked the 56th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by the United States during World War II on August 6th. More than 200,000 people were killed in that attack, while Nagasaki was likewise bombed on August 9, 1945.
Kawar, a former deputy, said the caller gave no more details and hung up quickly. "We take this claim seriously," he said.
About 20 Japanese companies have offices in New York's World Trade Center (WTC) twin towers that were hit by two jets in an attack, Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK) said Tuesday.
The companies are mainly bank and brokerage branches including Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank (DKB) and Fuji Bank, NHK said.
DKB has about 350 employees in the WTC in offices above the 80th floor, roughly the level where at least one of the aircraft smashed into the building, NHK said.
Japanese companies with offices in the devastated WTC buildings were trying to contact their offices there, but had received no answer, company officials said, according to Kyodo News.
NHK said earlier that the buildings had been evacuated shortly after the first plane crashed.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was joined at his official residence by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda as the government tried to gather details on any Japanese casualties, NHK said.
The Red Army is one of many groups that may have gripes with the U.S. government, including ones within the U.S.
The notion that the United States was immune from acts of homegrown terrorism was destroyed six years ago when a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
The explosion on April 19, 1995, irrevocably changed hundreds of lives, and survivors, rescuers and family and friends of the dead are still grappling with the effects of what was at the time considered the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
The man who masterminded the explosion, Timothy McVeigh, was executed on June 11th after admitting that he set the bomb. McVeigh called off further legal efforts in early June to delay the execution. He was the first federal prisoner to be executed in 38 years.
There are many other groups in the U.S. as well. Racist groups such as the Aryan Nation and Ku Klux Klan who preach white supremacy top this list.
Hostility to the federal government is at an all-time high in many western U.S. states. This animosity can be seen in numerous bombings and assaults directed against federal agencies and personnel.
But such activities are not necessarily restricted to western states. In October 1996, the FBI uncovered a West Virginia militia plot to bomb the new FBI fingerprint center in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
A report issued by Dr. Stefan Leader, a senior security analyst with Eagle Research Group (a company which provides technical and management consulting expertise to government and private industry), said that other antigovernment conspiracies have been uncovered in Georgia as well.
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