DNA tests confirm Japanese fugitive’s death after 50 years on the run

A poster of Satoshi Kirishima (foreground) at a train station in Tokyo. PHOTO: AFP

TOKYO (AFP): DNA analysis has confirmed that a 70-year-old man who confessed on his hospital deathbed last month to being one of Japan's most-wanted fugitives was indeed the suspect, police said Tuesday.

Satoshi Kirishima, a former member of a Japanese radical leftist group behind deadly bomb attacks in the 1970s, was wanted for nearly 50 years, with his bespectacled, smiling mugshots almost omnipresent outside police stations across Japan.