Fifty-four years after Kozo Okamoto helped murder 26 people at Lod Airport in 1972, his death at seventy-eight has reached the survivors and bereaved not as triumph, but as a quiet closing of a wound that never fully healed. The families of the Puerto Rican pilgrims he killed — including a daughter who grew up without her mother — have spent decades watching a man live freely and without remorse while their own lives were shaped by his violence. That they speak now not of vengeance but of forgiveness is perhaps the most searching commentary on what it means to outlast an act of evil.
Lod Airport massacre survivor's family finds closure in terrorist's death
26 people killed (8 Israelis, 1 Canadian, 17 Puerto Rican US citizens) and 80 wounded in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre; one victim's daughter grew up without her mother.