Police have served a third arrest warrant on a former elite Foreign Ministry bureaucrat who was fired last month after being arrested for paying teenage girls for sex, police officials said Thursday.
Toshiyuki Sato, 34, was served the latest warrant over allegations that he paid two 15-year-old girls 10,000 yen each after he fondled them at a karaoke parlor in Atsugi, Kanagawa Prefecture, in September. He also allegedly paid 20,000 yen for sex with one of the girls at an Atsugi hotel the following month.
He said he met the girls through a telephone dating service.
Sato has already been charged with paying 10,000 yen for sex with another 15-year-old junior high school girl in a parked car in September and paying 10,000 yen for sex with another 15-year-old in January at a hotel.
Under a 1999 law against paying people under 18 for sex, violators face imprisonment of up to three years or a fine of up to 1 million yen.
Sato had been deputy director of the protocol office in the Foreign Minister's Secretariat. The ministry dismissed him without a retirement allowance on March 13.
Sato, a graduate of the University of Tokyo, joined the ministry in April 1991 as an elite, fast-track career bureaucrat.
Kanagawa Prefecture has an ordinance barring people from having sex with under-age teens, but Sato reportedly has not been charged with this offense.