Organizational cover-up suspected in prosecutor's data doctoring+

OSAKA, Sept. 22 Kyodo -
Senior officials in the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office had been told
that a prosecutor arrested Tuesday tampered with data seized last year in
relation to a postal abuse case, sources at the office said Wednesday, hinting
at an organizational cover-up.
Tsunehiko Maeda, 43, who was the principal prosecutor in the case against
welfare official Atsuko Muraki, divulged to colleagues that he altered the
data, and the information had been passed on to the office's top officials, the
sources said. Muraki, 54, was acquitted Sept. 10.
An investigative team from the Supreme Public Prosecutors Office is poised to
look into the district office's possible organizational involvement in
knowingly leaving the falsified data without investigating the prosecutor's
alleged impropriety, they said.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku suggested that the prosecutor general
should take responsibility for the scandal more strictly than a corporate
manager would, and Liberal Democratic Party Diet affairs chief Ichiro Aisawa
said the main opposition party will consider asking parliament to summon senior
prosecutors as unsworn witnesses.
In about February, Maeda told his boss as head of the Osaka prosecutors'
special investigation unit and colleagues in the trial unit that he ''happened
to falsify'' the data on a floppy disk seized from the home of Muraki's
subordinate in May last year, the sources said.
The investigation unit chief, Hiromichi Otsubo, who is now deputy chief
prosecutor at the Kyodo District Public Prosecutors Office, reported his
remarks to Osaka's chief and deputy chief prosecutors of the time, they said.
Shortly after Muraki's trial opened in late January, her defense argued that
the date on which prosecutors argued a document key to the case was prepared
was different from the date recorded in an investigative report compiled from
data on the disk.
The district prosecutors' office is believed to have forgone revealing what
Maeda did as it had already returned the disk to its owner Tsutomu Kamimura,
Muraki's subordinate who is facing a separate trial over the case.
According to the investigative report approved by the court as evidence, the
disk, which contained text of the official document that enabled a bogus
organization to abuse the mail discount system for handicapped people, was last
updated on June 1, 2004. However, it was later found to have been altered on
June 8, when it returned from prosecutors.
The prosecutors argued during Muraki's trial that she instructed Kamimura, 41,
to issue the document ''around early June.''
Maeda admitted to the allegation when questioned by other Osaka prosecutors
prior to his arrest Tuesday, saying he happened to change the date on the disk
when he was ''amusing'' himself by transferring its content to a USB drive,
sources said earlier.
After the revelation, Muraki was reinstated Tuesday to the Health, Labor and
Welfare Ministry. Her acquittal was finalized as prosecutors gave up appealing
the Osaka District Court ruling.
==Kyodo
2010-09-22 19:40:05