In November 2000, May Shigenobu stood speechless in front of her TV set in Beirut, staring at crackly satellite images of her mother, Fusako Shigenobu, giving the thumbs-up and smiling as she was led away by police in Osaka, half a world away.

To May, the gesture meant: "Don't worry about me, I'm OK. You take care of yourself.''

To most people, the older Shigenobu is known as the founder of the deadly Japanese Red Army, a group dedicated to the cause of Palestinian liberation that hijacked planes, took hostages and launched a machinegun and grenade attack on Israel's Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion Airport) in 1972, killing 26 people and injuring 78 others. Arrested in Japan after spending 25 years on the run, Fusako was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment in February 2006 by a Japanese court for planning and procuring weapons for the Japanese Red Army's 1974 storming of the French Embassy in The Hague, the Netherlands (a charge Fusako denies).