Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said Thursday evening that he had wanted lawmaker Shokei Arai, found hanged at a Tokyo hotel earlier in the day, to clear himself of suspicion of wrongdoing in court rather than take his own life.

"Since he has been claiming innocence, he should have tried to prove it in court," the prime minister told reporters. Arai killed himself just hours before he was to be arrested on suspicion of receiving illegal profits from Nikko Securities Co.

During the Lower House plenary session, Hashimoto also offered his condolences. Arai was a Lower House member from Hashimoto's Liberal Democratic Party. "We pray his soul may rest in peace, whatever circumstances surrounded him," Hashimoto said during the Diet session, where party leaders questioned him about the 1998 policy speech he made Monday.

Hashimoto's remarks echoed similar comments by Takako Doi, leader of the Social Democratic Party. Doi urged Hashimoto to get the LDP to hasten efforts to improve political ethics by cutting money ties between the LDP and businesses. The SDP is one of the two smaller non-Cabinet allies of the LDP.

"Today we had an extremely sad piece of news that one of our colleague lawmakers has committed suicide," Doi told the plenary session. "The LDP should make much greater efforts to establish political ethics so as not to allow the recurrence of such a sad event," Doi said.

The LDP, the SDP and New Party Sakigake are currently working to draft a bill to root out money-related scandals involving politicians and businesses. So far, the LDP has been reluctant to ban donations from businesses to individual politicians.

Before the plenary session closed, members of the Lower House steering committee decided to cancel a plan to have the plenary session vote on whether the chamber would allow prosecutors to take Arai into custody.

Originally, the vote was scheduled to take place around 6 p.m. after the question-and-answer session. It is likely that the permission would have been given to the authorities unanimously. Prosecutors needed permission to arrest Arai because Diet members have Constitutional immunity from arrest when the Diet is in session, as it is now.

Later in the day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kanezo Muraoka offered his condolences to Arai's family. Referring to Arai's protestations of his innocence the previous day, Muraoka told a regular press conference that his suicide was very surprising and regrettable because it was expected that the truth behind the scandal would be uncovered.

Hearing the news of Arai's suicide, LDP Secretary General Koichi Kato said he does not understand why Arai chose to die. "He had been insisting that he had not done anything wrong. I wish he had continued to make efforts to prove his innocence," Kato told reporters.

Kato asked Arai twice to resign from the party over the scandal, but Arai refused, saying leaving the party would mean the end of his political career.