Public prosecutors on Saturday indicted a junior high school teacher on a charge of confinement resulting in the death of a 12-year-old girl in July after she was found fatally injured on a highway in Kobe.
Ken Fukumoto, 34, is accused of handcuffing first-year junior high school student Noriko Kamiie in his car and, as she tried to escape, causing her to fall from the vehicle onto the highway, where she was hit by a truck on the night of July 24.
Fukumoto, a resident of Toyooka in Hyogo Prefecture and a teacher of social studies at a school in Hyogo's Kasumi, sprayed tear gas in the girl's face, handcuffed her and was driving her to a hotel when she fell out of his car, they said.
A driver discovered Kamiie, from Osaka's Higashi-Yodogawa Ward, lying beside the Chugoku Expressway in Kobe's Kita Ward shortly after 10:30 p.m. that night.
She was rushed to a hospital, but died of blood loss the following day.
She had fractured her skull and broken her left leg from the fall and being hit by the truck, which police are trying to identify.
Fukumoto met Kamiie through a telephone dating club, according to the prosecutors.