Court Discarded All Records of 1997 Kobe Serial Child Attacks

Kobe, Oct. 20 (Jiji Press)--All criminal records of a man over a series of attacks on children in Kobe, western Japan, in 1997 have been discarded by a local family court, it was learned Thursday.

Kobe Family Court said that why and when the records were discarded is unknown. The disposal of the records was inappropriate under current operational rules, the court in the Hyogo Prefecture capital said.

In the cases, five elementary school children were attacked in Kobe's Suma Ward between February and May of 1997, with two of them--a fourth-grade girl and a sixth-grade boy--murdered. The man in question was arrested at the age of 14, put on a juvenile trial at the court and sent to a juvenile medical treatment facility. He fully left the facility in 2005.

The serial attacks led to a revision of the juvenile law, which lowered the age at which people can be criminally punished to 14.

The records discarded by the court are believed to have included documents on the result of the juvenile trial, investigations by law-enforcement authorities and the outcome of a psychiatric evaluation conducted on the man.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]