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Police in Okinawa in Japan's southernmost prefecture issued a further arrest warrant on an already detained former U.S. Marine and base worker for the rape and murder of a 20-year old local woman in April as Okinawans are becoming increasingly incensed at the U.S. presence on the island, local media reported Thursday.
According to the report, the accused, Kenneth Franklin Shinzato, 32, was originally arrested on May 19 as investigative sources suspected him of dumping the woman's body and were conducting DNA checks on Shinzato's car and the deceased's body and subsequently located a bar and a knife that have also been implicated as potential murder weapons.
Shinzato had, prior to murdering the young lady, prepared a suitcase to transport the woman's body, in what investigative sources have said indicates Shinzato's plans to murder a girl were premeditated.
He stands accused of raping the deceased in a grassy area beside the road in Uruma in central Okinawa, as the young lady was walking home, before stabbing her to death with a knife on April 28.
Initially, Shinzato told investigators he had struck the women multiple times from behind with a metal bar and stabbed her repeatedly. There were also reports that Shizato also attempted to strangle his victim whom he'd been driving around to search for, for as long as 3 hours, the sources said, adding that the knife, the main murder weapon, has yet to be found.
The accused has not been cooperating with local investigators and has remained silent regarding pertinent information to the murder, such as the location of the knife and his motive, although the metal bar has been retrieved from a water channel. Local sources on Thursday said that Shizato has remained silent duty interrogations since May 20.
A recent spate of internationally-reported crimes committed by U.S base-linked personnel in Okinawa has renewed calls from prefectural officials as well as locals for the tiny island to comprehensively have its base-hosting burdens lifted as the disproportionate number of bases being hosted on the tiny island is thought to be directly attributable to the rising instances of crime.
Anti-U.S. sentiment has been steadily rising on the island and following the murder of the young lady more than 4,000 protesters took to the streets to protest the overbearing U.S. presence in Okinawa and called for both the local and central government to take definitive steps to lessen their base-hosting burden.
Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga is a stanch advocate of lessening the island's burden by at first blocking the planned transfer of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from the crowed area of Ginowan to the coastal Nago region also on the island, and along with other prefectural officials opposed to the move, following recent elections, now comprise a majority in the prefectural assembly.
As such, and in light of crimes committed by U.S. base-affiliated personnel, calls are becoming more vociferous from assembly officials to not only scrap the plan to relocate the controversial marine base, but to see a key agreement made between Japan and the U.S. governing how U.S. servicepeople are dealt with legally, following instances of crime and infraction, reviewed.
The government here wants to swiftly review the archaic Japan-U. S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), with other crimes committed recently also supporting the move and contributed to rising indignation from the locals against the U.S.
A car driven by a member of the U.S. Navy off base recently careened out of its lane and struck at least two other cars recently, injuring two civilians, and a U.S. Navy sailor raping a women after she had passed out in a hotel in Naha City, the capital of Okinawa, earlier this year, has also ensured the international spotlight is now firmly concentrated on the U.S. presence in Okinawa.
The fact that 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan are in Okinawa, yet the island accounts for just 1 percent of Japan's land mass is no longer being viewed as just a quotable statistic, with the likes of Onaga and other likeminded officials now ramping up their plans to return Okinawa to the islanders, and see the number of bases significantly reduced, despite the U.S.'s plans to pivot to Asia.
The crimes by U.S. servicepeople against Japanese citizens are not just being committed in Okinawa, which has even more serious implication for the SOFA, observers have explained, stating that lesser crimes would almost certainly go unpunished or unreported, meaning the actual scale of the problem is likely far larger than thought and should be dealt with as such.
One case in point was a U.S. Navy officer who was arrested in March after sexually assaulting and repeatedly punching a Japanese woman in the face as he sat next to her on a commercial air flight from the United States to Japan.
The Navy lieutenant, based at the Atsugi Naval Air Facility, Japan, was arrested for assaulting the 19-year-old female college student on a flight from San Diego to Japan. According to testimony, he repeatedly groped her body while she was sat in her seat, before punching her in the head several times, in a brutal assault that lasted 90 minutes.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he plans to expedite a review of the current SOFA, which was originally inked in Washington between the U.S. and Japan in 1960, with many political watchers also believing it does not work to effectively legislate treatment of U.S. servicepeople here who commit crimes and doesn't reflect the growing instances and severity of such.
Under the current agreement, U.S forces' personnel can be granted a great deal of legal autonomy and while the Japanese court system has jurisdiction for most crimes committed by U.S. service members, if the accused was "acting in official duty," or if the victim was another American, the U.S. justice system is used, not Japan's, despite the location.
In some instances under the SOFA the majority of U.S. military members are exempt from Japan's visa and passport laws and past offenders have dodged the Japanese legal system here by being transferred back to the U.S. before being charged. Another loophole that exists in the agreement is that unless an offender is arrested outside of a base by Japanese police or investigators, then U.S. authorities are allowed to retain custody of that individual.
The U.S. has often invoked its extraterritorial rights and has dealt with crimes committed here by its military members as per U. S. law and out of the view of Japanese investigators or prosecutors; with suspicions constantly aroused about leniency being used by the U.S. in favor of its own nationals in cases that Japanese prosecutors would come down far harder on.
Such issues have further incense local Okinawans who not only live while suffering from noise and pollution from the U.S. bases, as well as accidents, but also in fear of crimes that occur, that may go unpunished and that they may never receive justice for.
(APD)
