LEAD: Organizational cover-up suspected in prosecutor's data alteration

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OSAKA, Sept. 22 Kyodo -
(EDS: ADDING INFO)
Senior Osaka prosecutors were aware that a prosecutor arrested Tuesday
allegedly tampered with seized data in connection with a postal abuse case, but
did not investigate or disclose it, prosecution sources said Wednesday, hinting
at an organizational cover-up.
The senior prosecutors, including the chief prosecutor at the Osaka District
Public Prosecutors Office, came to know of the allegations after a colleague of
Tsunehiko Maeda, 43, grilled him in February over the data alteration,
suspecting that he may have modified a file on a seized floppy disk, the
sources said.
The two got into an argument at that time, the sources added.
Maeda led a botched investigation into the case against welfare ministry senior
official Atsuko Muraki, 54, who was acquitted on Sept. 10.
The information on the allegations was passed on to the district office's
senior prosecutors via Hiromichi Otsubo, deputy chief prosecutor at the Kyoto
District Public Prosecutors Office who had led the investigative squad at the
time, the sources said.
But the district office is believed to have forgone investigating or disclosing
the misconduct because the disk had already been returned to its owner Tsutomu
Kamimura, 41, Muraki's subordinate who is facing a separate trial over the
case.
A team of investigators from the Supreme Public Prosecutors Office is set to
question senior Osaka prosecutors over the possibility that the district office
was involved in covering up the misconduct so that it would not be leaked
outside.
The Osaka prosecutors seized the disk at Kamimura's home in May last year,
according to the acquittal ruling for Muraki. On the disk was a text file
containing the same fabricated official document that enabled a bogus
organization to abuse postal discounts for the handicapped. It was last updated
on June 1, 2004.
The defense learned of the details through an investigative report compiled by
the prosecutors and submitted the report to the court as evidence. But when the
defense examined the disk after it was returned from the prosecutors, the file
was now found to have been last updated on June 8, 2004, according to sources.
The prosecutors argued during Muraki's trial that Muraki instructed Kamimura to
issue the document ''around early June.''
Following his arrest, Maeda has denied the allegations during questioning by
the Supreme Public Prosecutors Office, saying he did not alter the data
''intentionally,'' according to the sources.
Also Wednesday, the Osaka District Court allowed the prosecutors to hold Maeda
in detention for 10 days through Oct. 1 for further questioning.
Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku suggested that the
prosecutor general should take responsibility for the scandal more strictly
than a corporate manager would.
Liberal Democratic Party Diet affairs chief Ichiro Aisawa said the main
opposition party will consider asking parliament to summon senior prosecutors
as unsworn witnesses.
Maeda told prosecutors at the district office on Tuesday before his arrest that
he happened to modify the disk while he was playing around by altering the
numerical attributes of its content after transferring it to a USB drive,
according to prosecution sources.
==Kyodo
2010-09-22 20:59:01