OSAKA -- The 1999 suicide of an elementary school principal has met the requirements for accident compensation, according to officials of an accident fund for public servants.

Hiroshi Dokita, the 70-year-old widower of Kiyomi Dokita, who killed herself while she was principal of Uriwarinishi Elementary School in Osaka, filed an application for compensation with the Osaka chapter of the Fund for Local Government Employees' Accident Compensation in December 1999.

The fund decided to award the compensation last Wednesday, according to the officials.

He claimed that his wife committed suicide in March 1999 at age 56 as a result of overwork and exhaustion in dealing with the parent of a student who had died in a traffic accident two years earlier.

The compensation is awarded to local government employees who die or suffer injury in the line of work. It is the first time for the fund to cover a principal's suicide after new standards for deaths from overwork were set in July 1999.

The mother of the dead boy, who was in the third grade at the school at the time of the traffic accident in April 1997, started to criticize the school and the principal in November 1998 over the loss of her son, according to lawyers for Dokita.

The mother criticized the principal for clapping after one student delivered a speech at her son's funeral, and took to calling the principal's home several times a day.

Kiyomi was hospitalized in February 1999 for depression and killed herself by jumping into a river in Nishinari Ward on March 22 while on temporary discharge from the hospital.