A police officer in Aichi Prefecture has confessed during questioning to dumping large volumes of items used as evidence in criminal cases.
Officials in the Aichi Prefectural Police said Wednesday they are preparing to charge him with destruction of evidence.
The unnamed officer, who was identified only as being in his 60s, was an assistant inspector at Moriyama Police Station.
He wrote in his reports that he sent all of the evidence items to the prosecutor's office, but in reality he kept them. Among the items were a camera and a crowbar.
He later disposed of them in bags on a mountain in Seto, Aichi Prefecture.
The officer reportedly said that he found the procedure for sending the evidence to prosecutors "troublesome."
A passerby found the discarded items and alerted officers at Seto Police Station.
The items are related to investigations into theft and other cases, and date back several years, the police said.
Some of the items had tags showing they had been kept at Moriyama Police Station.