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A U.S. Navy sailor arrested on suspicion of assaulting a woman in a hotel in Naha City, Okinawa Prefecture, admitting to raping her, local media reported Wednesday.
The sailor, who has been named as 24-year-old Justin Castellanos, is based at the U.S. Marines' Camp Schwab in northern Okinawa, and after being arrested on March 13 following allegations of the attack, initially denied the charges.
Local sources, however, confirmed that Castellanos admitted to the charges of raping the women in her 40s, who was visiting Naha from Fukuoka prefecture, in a hotel in the capital of Japan's southernmost prefecture, in the early hours of March 13.
Police have said that the accused found the women, to whom he was unacquainted, asleep in a corridor in the hotel they were both staying at, and took her to his room where he raped her.
The incident sparked mass protests in Okinawa with local citizens there becoming increasingly infuriated not just with hosting the bulk of U.S. military facilities in Japan, but with instances of crimes committed on the tiny island by U.S. military personnel.
The Okinawa prefectural assembly on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution and statement that insists that both U.S. and Japanese governments take tangible steps to ensure the discipline of U.S. service people when they are off duty.
The assembly found that the U.S. military has been negligent in its responsibility to ensure such incidents do not occur and demanded that the U.S. military fully disclose the activities of its service people, even when they are off duty, and do more to prevent such criminal acts.
The resolution adopted by the assembly will be sent to both governments as well as U.S. bases on Okinawa island.
Okinawans' anti-U.S. base sentiment has been steadily growing since the the brutal rape of an elementary schoolgirl in Okinawa by three U.S. servicemen in 1995.
