A man accused of carrying out a deadly arson attack on a Kyoto Animation Co. studio four years ago admitted the charges in the indictment, in the first hearing of his trial at Kyoto District Court on Tuesday.
“I didn’t imagine that so many people would lose their lives, and I now think that I went too far,” Shinji Aoba, 45, said at the outset of the lay judge trial, admitting that he carried out the attack.
The Sapporo District Public Prosecutors Office in the capital of
Hokkaido, northern Japan, obtained approval from Sapporo
Summary Court on Thursday to examine whether the 29-year-old
woman, her father, 59, and her mother, 60, are mentally
competent to bear criminal responsibility, the investigative
sources said.
Lawyers for the parents filed a complaint against the approval
with Sapporo District Court on Friday.
A man who attacked passengers on a crowded Tokyo train on Halloween night in 2021 while dressed as the Joker was sentenced to 23 years in prison on Monday for stabbing one of them and lighting a fire.
Yukari Okutsu, who has lived in the facility since before the attack, told the gathering that she tries to ease the anxiety of her fellow residents by talking to them when they are in trouble. She went on to say, “My 19 friends, please continue watching over us from heaven.” Okutsu gave the first memorial speech by a resident of the facility.
A Ground Self-Defense Force recruit who fatally shot two of his instructors and injured another during a live-fire training exercise in central Japan last month will be subjected to a psychiatric evaluation, prosecutors said Thursday.
The 18-year-old will be detained for approximately four months through Nov. 24 for the examination, the Gifu Summary Court said after accepting the request by prosecutors for his detention.
The accused underwent six months of psychiatric examinations before prosecutors decided in December 2020 that he could be held criminally responsible. A separate evaluation requested by Aoba’s lawyers has also been concluded.
Japanese police plan to launch a new unit based in the Tokyo metropolitan area next spring to investigate the rising number of scams nationwide that often target the elderly, with the new team to involve police officers from across the country, officials said Saturday.
The envisioned unit is expected to have more members and a larger role than an existing team that was established in 2005 to tackle so-called special fraud cases, covering scams such as the swindling of elderly people by impersonating their children and asking for urgent money transfers over the phone.
An investigation by a third-party committee established by the city confirmed that the former vice president of the corporation had been physically and psychologically abusing several patients for about 10 years.
The woman’s face was lifeless and she had brown bruises. She got up from her wheelchair and tried to step forward, but collapsed to her knees after two or three steps.
According to the prefectural police force’s first criminal investigation division, Yumiko had been locked in the closet from the outside. She had meals regularly, but is believed to have been locked up several dozen times over the space of three months. She escaped when the four went out, and police took her into protective custody in Kobe’s Tarumi Ward on the evening of June 20. She was in a wheelchair, and suffering from eye and back injuries, but her injuries were not life-threatening, police said.
Barrier Free Japan