A Nepalese man who shared a Tokyo flat with compatriot Govinda Prasad Mainali, 45, said Monday he was coerced while in detention in Japan to sign a false statement indicating his roommate had murdered a Tokyo woman in 1997 in order to rob her.
Mainali was last week deported to Nepal after being granted a retrial presumably to exonerate him after he spent 15 years in a Yokohama prison for the March 8, 1997, murder of the 39-year-old woman, an employee of Tokyo Electric Power Co. who engaged in prostitution on the side, because evidence long held by prosecutors that suggested his innocence was newly brought to light.
Nepalese migrant worker Narendra Kumar Khadka, 42, said in a Monday interview in his hometown of Dhulabari in eastern Nepal that Japanese police pressured him into signing the statement to prove Mainali murdered the woman, and the defendant's counsel never contacted him in an attempt to refute that claim.