Tokyo police have sent documents to prosecutors for two male suspects in their 50s for defaming three people on X, including a man who lost his wife and child in a high-profile car accident in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district.
One of the suspects, Hironori Ishibashi, 57, is a representative director of the Forensics Analysis Laboratory. According to the Fukuoka-based institute's website, the suspect has been involved in over 1,000 traffic accident analyses and has been commissioned by both police and courts. He has also appeared on TV programs multiple times.
He is accused along with an unnamed man in his 50s from the city of Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, of defaming Takuya Matsunaga, 37, whose wife and daughter were killed by a runaway car in Ikebukuro in April 2019.
The police recommended "severe punishment" in their referral.
The unnamed suspect is a dispatch worker who was co-hosting a live stream with Ishibashi. They allegedly made defamatory remarks about Matsunaga on Nov. 19, 2023, using X's voice chat feature, calling him "money-grubbing" and "an idiot."
They are also suspected of targeting Juri Ozawa, 43, head of a group of bereaved families of traffic crime victims, and Yoshinori Nakae, 60, who lost his daughter in a similar accident in Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, in 2012, falsely claiming they had "sexual relations with other bereaved family members."
The police launched an investigation after receiving complaints from the three victims.
In a joint statement issued on Thursday afternoon, Matsunaga and the other victims said, “In this instance false statements were publicly presented as if they were true. We will keep speaking out to prevent further defamation and slander of crime victims."
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