The Metropolitan Police Department on Sunday began questioning three of the four Japanese Red Army members sent back to Japan from Lebanon over the weekend, police sources said.

Haruo Wako, 51, Masao Adachi, 60, and Mariko Yamamoto, 59, have already been appointed lawyers but have yet to admit to the charges against them, according to the sources.

Only Adachi has acknowledged his identity to investigators, they said.

The three were arrested immediately on arriving in Japan on Saturday evening and sent to the Metropolitan Police Department.

The fourth Red Army member, Kazuo Tohira, 47, whose trial had been under way when he was allowed to leave Japan as part of an exchange for hostages in 1975, was taken to the Tokyo Detention House.

The four were in a group of five Japanese Red Army members arrested in Lebanon in 1997 and sentenced to three years in prison for using forged passports. Their prison terms expired March 7.

The Lebanese government on Friday granted the fifth member, Kozo Okamoto, 52, political asylum out of consideration for his role in operations against Israel and his claim to have been subsequently tortured in Israeli prisons.

Okamoto's lawyers in Lebanon said Saturday he is likely to be released from Roumyieh prison on the outskirts of Beirut on Monday after being held for three years.

He will be free as soon as paperwork to grant him asylum is completed Monday, they said.

Okamoto's supporters said they plan to take him to the home of one of a supporter in Beirut after his release.

However, Lebanese authorities may first transfer him to a government facility to prevent other Japanese Red Army members or other radical groups from contacting him, sources said.

He became physically weak after learning that his four comrades had been deported from Lebanon on Friday, according to the lawyers.

Okamoto was sentenced to life imprisonment in Israel for taking part in a May 1972 attack at Tel Aviv's Lod airport that left 26 people dead and 76 others injured. In 1985, however, he was released as part of a prisoner swap between Israel and Palestinian guerrillas.

Wako is suspected of attempted murder and taking hostages in the 1974 occupation of the French Embassy in The Hague. He is also suspected of attempted murder for his role in the group's occupation of the U.S. and Swedish embassies in Kuala Lumpur in 1975. Wako was allegedly in charge of arms for the group.

Adachi, a former film director and the group's spokesman, was arrested on suspicion of using a fictitious name to enter the then Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Yamamoto is suspected of obtaining a forged passport and giving it to a Japanese Red Army member in 1974.

The statute of limitations does not apply to these cases as they had fled overseas.

Tohira was arrested in Stockholm in 1975 on suspicion of using a forged passport and was subsequently indicted in Japan on that charge.

However, in an extrajudicial action by the Japanese government, he was freed during his trial in exchange for the release of the hostages in the 1975 Kuala Lumpur embassy seizures.