The Tokyo District Court on Thursday approved lawyers' requests for a psychiatric examination of a 30-year-old man charged with hijacking an All Nippon Airways jumbo jet and stabbing its pilot to death in July 1999.
Lawyers for Yuji Nishizawa, an unemployed native of Tokyo, have argued that their client should not be held criminally responsible for the hijacking because he was mentally unfit at the time of the incident.
Nishizawa himself pleaded guilty to the charges at the first hearing of his trial in December 1999.