MITO, Ibaraki Pref. (Kyodo) A labor office in Ibaraki Prefecture will acknowledge that a Chinese national working as an intern at a local firm under a government-authorized training program died from overwork in 2008, marking the first foreign trainee "karoshi" death from overwork, sources said Friday.

The male trainee, Jiang Xiaodong, had worked since 2005 at Fuji Denka Kogyo, a metal processing firm in the city of Itako, Ibaraki Prefecture, but died of cardiac arrest in June 2008 in company housing at age 31.

He worked more than 100 hours overtime in his last month, the Kashima labor standards inspection office said.

Jiang's relatives are separately claiming he worked more than 150 hours overtime in his second year and after. However, he was only given two days off in a month, they claimed.

According to a group of lawyers trying to raise the issue of the trainee program's abuse by many employers as a source of cheap labor, this will be the first intern karoshi. The lawyers also accuse the government of having lax oversight of trainee working conditions.

The labor office turned over to prosecutors Friday their case against the company and its 66-year-old president, alleging the accused violated the Labor Standards Act by having the trainee work long hours and failed to pay him overtime wages.

The president of Fuji Denka Kogyo told Kyodo News that the trainee "worked in a busy production line, and I was just about considering introducing work shifts so he could share his work with other trainees."

"But when I proposed the idea, he said he wanted to do his job by himself," the president added, in an apparent move to justify the trainee's working conditions.

According to the company, no health problems were found when Jiang underwent the firm's regular health check.