Weekly magazine Shukan Shincho paid ¥900,000 to a man who claimed that he was the one responsible for a 1987 shooting at the Asahi Shimbun's Hanshin bureau that killed one reporter and injured another, the magazine's editorial department said Thursday.
"As we carried his memoir, it is natural that we would pay a fee for the manuscript to him," a member of the editorial staff said. The man, however, retracted his confession in another weekly magazine issued Thursday.
Shukan Shincho ran the man's memoir as a four-part series starting with its Feb. 5 issue. But the Asahi Shimbun has concluded the memoir is "a lie" after conducting its own examination and is seeking an apology from the publisher of Shukan Shincho.