TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Law-enforcement authorities are not planning to arrest a Japan Coast Guard member suspected of posting online a diplomatically sensitive video of collisions between Chinese and Japanese vessels near disputed islands in the East China Sea but will continue questioning him on a voluntary basis, investigative sources said Monday.
Tokyo police and prosecutors, with which the Coast Guard has filed a criminal complaint over the leak, have been in consultations over whether to arrest the 43-year-old maritime police officer who has allegedly confessed to posting the video on YouTube.
The navigator of the Uranami, a patrol boat of the Kobe Coast Guard Office, has been questioned for days without arrest on suspicion of posting on the popular video-sharing website footage showing the September collisions between a Chinese trawler and Coast Guard patrol boats near the Senkaku Islands.
The questioning on a voluntary basis extended into a fourth day Monday after a lull over the weekend, according to the investigative sources. The officer has remained at the building in the western Japanese port city of Kobe where the Coast Guard office is housed since he reportedly confessed his involvement last Wednesday.
Reporters broadcast in front of the government building housing the 5th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters in Chuo Ward, Kobe, on Nov. 10. (Mainichi)
The Coast Guard member is alleged to have violated the National Public Service Law, which prohibits civil servants from divulging "secrets" obtained in the course of their work. The government has withheld the video from the public, apparently out of concern not to provoke China. One clip shows a boat, believed to be the Chinese trawler, ramming into a Japanese Coast Guard patrol boat.
The roughly 44-minute-long video, which was posted on YouTube in six clips on Nov. 4, was recorded by members of a Coast Guard office in Okinawa Prefecture during the Sept. 7 collisions in the East China Sea.
Meanwhile, investigative sources said Sunday the leaked video of the collisions was stored in a shared folder on a computer terminal at the Japan Coast Guard Academy in Hiroshima Prefecture without access restrictions for about four or five days from mid-September.
The Coast Guard member in question has told the police that the footage was obtained from the academy's shared folder.
The footage was provided by the 11th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, to the officers' school on Sept. 17 for analysis of the collision situation, the sources said.
He was quoted as telling investigators that a colleague had downloaded the video footage from the academy's shared folder onto a personal computer in the Uranami in late September and that he saved it on a USB data storage device in mid-October.
The Senkaku Islands, called Diaoyu in China, are administered by Japan but claimed by China. The subsequent arrest and detention of the trawler's captain pushed Japanese-Chinese relations to their lowest point in years.
(Mainichi Japan) November 15, 2010
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