Charges threatened against couple who allegedly defamed families of traffic accident victims

The Tokyo police have provided the public prosecutor’s office with documents on two male suspects in their 50s who are said to have defamed three people on X. Among them was a man who lost his wife and child in a high-profile car accident in the Tokyo district of Ikebukuro.

One of the suspects, 57-year-old Hironori Ishibashi, is deputy 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 television shows several times.

He is accused, along with an unnamed man in his 50s from the city of Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture, of defaming 37-year-old Takuya Matsunaga, whose wife and daughter were killed by a runaway car in Ikebukuro in April 2019.

In their advisory, the police recommended a “harsh punishment.”

The unnamed suspect is a dispatcher who co-hosted a live stream with Ishibashi. On November 19, 2023, they allegedly made defamatory remarks about Matsunaga through X’s voice chat feature, calling him “greedy” and “an idiot.”

They are also suspected of targeting 43-year-old Juri Ozawa, the head of a group of relatives of traffic crime victims, and 60-year-old Yoshinori Nakae, who lost his daughter in a similar accident in Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, in 2012, by falsely claiming they had “sexual relations with other grieving family members.”

Police launched an investigation after receiving complaints from the three victims.

In a joint statement Thursday afternoon, Matsunaga and the other victims said: “In this case, false statements were publicly presented as true. We will continue to speak out to prevent further defamation and slander of crime victims.”

Translated by The Japan Times