A Japanese militant leftist group said Friday it fired home-made mortar rounds at the Japan Defense Agency as a protest over the sending of Japanese troops to Iraq, reports said.The group, calling itself "Kakumeigun (Revolutionary Army)," sent letters to several news organisations claiming responsibility for the attack in central Tokyo earlier this week.
The top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said a letter it received claimed the attack was carried out "in an effort to forcefully stop the deployment of the Self Defense Forces to take part in the counter-revolutionary war in Iraq."
The Asahi Shimbun said it also received the same letter, which expressed the group's opposition to the Iraq mission.
Tokyo police declined to comment on the letters.
Late on February 17, several explosions were heard near the Defense Agency.
Police found two launch detonators, two steel pipes and a fuse in a Buddhist temple graveyard about 800 metres (yards) from the agency. But no trace of the projectiles, assumed to be steel balls, was found and the attack caused no injuries or damage.
Police said at that time they suspected that leftist radicals, who have used explosives in previous protests, might be responsible.
Around 100 Japanese ground troops are already in southern Iraq, and a total of 600 will be deployed by late March, backed up some 400 naval and airforce personnel in the region, in the first dispatch of Japanese troops since World War II to a country where fighting is still going on.
Despite being a strictly humanitarian mission, the deployment has been opposed by around 50 percent of the Japanese people, according to opinion polls as it could violate the country's post-World War II constitution which bans the use of force in settling international disputes.
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