A high court has acquitted a man charged with raping a teenage girl in 2012, overturning a lower court ruling that gave him a four-year prison term.
The Fukuoka High Court's Miyazaki branch issued a ruling Tuesday saying that a fresh DNA analysis did not prove that the 23-year-old man from the city of Kagoshima was the culprit.
It also said the police may have hidden the result of an earlier DNA analysis that did not match that of the defendant.