Masaaki Osaka, 67, is accused of killing a police officer during protests in 1971. The authorities said they identified Mr. Osaka through DNA testing.
The police in Japan have arrested the country’s longest-sought fugitive, ending the hunt for a radical leftist accused of killing a police officer nearly 46 years ago.
The authorities this week confirmed the identity of the fugitive, Masaaki Osaka, 67, who was arrested last month in Hiroshima on a separate charge and refused to give his name, according to Kyodo, the Japanese news agency.
The police said they identified Mr. Osaka through DNA testing. A new arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday.
Mr. Osaka is accused of killing Tsuneo Nakamura, a Tokyo police officer, on Nov. 14,1971, when he threw a homemade gasoline bomb during a protest in Japan’s capital. Both men were 21 at the time.
The police clashed with thousands of activists during the protest against a treaty between the United States and Japan that resulted in the reversion of Osaka’s sovereignty to the Japanese government but allowed for a continued American military presence in the prefecture. Mr. Nakamura was killed and three other officers were wounded in the Tokyo riot. The police arrested 312 student radicals in the capital, according to news reports from the time.
Mr. Osaka was a leading member of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League-National Committee, a far-left revolutionary organization commonly known as Chukaku-ha.
It is believed that members of the group kept Mr. Osaka hidden for years, according to The Japan Times. On May 18, during an investigation of another leftist, the police raided an apartment in Hiroshima, where they were confronted by a man who tried to stop them from entering.
That man, who the authorities later suspected was Mr. Osaka, has remained silent, refusing to answer investigators’ questions, even about his name, for weeks.
The country has one of the lowest murder rates in the developed world, and the police take pride in quickly solving more than 90 percent of the murders they investigate, according to United Nations statistics .
Criminals are typically caught swiftly. In 2012, however, the police arrested another long-sought suspect, Naoko Kikuchi, 40, in connection with the role the authorities said she played in the deadly 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo’s subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
