Tasuku Ando

The family resemblance to Shin is unmistakable. Ando is a middle-aged man carrying medium-length blond hair along with matching facial hair. His outfit runs to a long-sleeved polo, pale trousers, and leather shoes.

Ando was a hard, callous man who thought little of endangering bystanders to save his own skin, going so far as to rig a ship with a bomb wired to his own heartbeat. Hunted for what he knew through the JAA, he lived in constant flight, and learning the truth behind the Al-Kamar Orphanage unsettled him enough to walk away from his post there. For all his professed hatred of Shin, some genuine feeling for his son survived underneath: he placed the boy with a fellow researcher rather than the assassins' orphanage, later shielded him from a strike by Ikari, and in his dying moments still longed to see him once more.

Years before the main story, Ando handed the young Shin over to his friend Asakura and disappeared, a move that left Asakura resentful at first before he came around and raised the boy well. Having no fighting ability of his own, the researcher kept the assassin Ikari on retainer as a bodyguard. His past finally caught up with him during the JAA Jail Arc, where he weathered Ikari's assault for a surprising stretch before succumbing, still yearning at the end to look upon the son he had left behind.