USO Club Bombing

On April 14, 1988, a USO club in Naples, Italy, was rocked by a car bomb that killed five people and injured more than a dozen, including several Americans. Further investigations revealed that the attack was in retaliation for the April 1986 bombings of military sites in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya.

The USO club in Naples was located on a busy, narrow street, just a block from the docks where two American warships were moored. When the car bomb exploded, at about 8 p.m., most American officers were in the entertainment rooms in the basement of club, and they therefore escaped injury. However, four Italians and one U.S. servicewoman walking in the crowded street were killed instantly, and at least 15 others suffered serious injuries from the flying debris and pieces of the car in which the bomb had been hidden.

Initially, Middle Eastern groups with anti-American sentiments were suspected. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Brigades of the Holy War, a fundamentalist Muslim group that told a news agency in Rome, “The imperialist American should die today, two years after their barbarous attacks against the Arab-Libyan state.” A similar call, also expressing anti-American, antiimperialist sentiments, was placed to an Italian news agency in Beirut, this time by representatives of the Organization of the Islamic Holy War for the Support of the World's Oppressed.

By the following day, however, Italian officials had linked the rental car and a nearby hotel room to a known international terrorist, Junzo Okudaira. Okudaira was part of the ultra-left-wing Japanese terrorist group known as the Japanese Red Army (JRA), which had been active in the 1970s and had links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang. After nearly a decade of inactivity, the JRA had resurfaced in mid-1980s. Okudaira and the JRA were thought to have allied with fundamentalist Shiite Muslim groups in Lebanon. Now the JRA was also apparently supported by the Libyan government.

As Italian officials ordered a nationwide manhunt for Okudaira, American officials were questioning another JRA member, Yu Kikumura, who had been arrested by a New Jersey state trooper two days prior to the USO bombing. Kikumura's suspicious behavior at a rest area had drawn the trooper's attention; he had three 18-inch pipe bombs and a map of New York City in the car when he was arrested. The map showed three targets: a navy recruiting office, Manhattan's Garment District, and the United Nations. Apparently, the bombs were to be placed two days later, set to explode at the same time as the USO bomb. Experts claimed that such tactics—striking different sites simultaneously—was typical of the JRA.

In 1989 Kikumura was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the bomb plot. He was released from a Colorado prison in 2007 and returned to Japan, where he was immediately arrested for questioning regarding his relationship with the Japanese Red Army. Kikumura, however, was given a suspended sentence and released. A week before the statute of limitations expired, on April 10, 1993, a U.S. grand jury indicted Okudaira for the bombing, though he remained at large. Okudaira had already been sentenced in absentia to a life term in Italy.

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