OSAKA (Kyodo) In another suspected ethics breach in the Justice Ministry, a prosecutor apparently induced a mentally impaired man to confess, on tape, to an Osaka arson, judicial sources said Thursday. The man was held for 10 months until freed due to lack of evidence.
Last year, three prosecutors in the Osaka District Prosecutor's Office were arrested and indicted for tampering with evidence related to an investigation into a postal discount scheme that was allegedly being abused by a senior health ministry bureaucrat. The bureaucrat was eventually acquitted.
In the latest Osaka case, the Sakai branch of the district public prosecutor's office indicted the impaired man for a December 2009 arson at a residential building in Kaizuka, Osaka Prefecture, but dropped his case last November after deciding it could not support the credibility of his confession after holding him for more than 10 months.