The Kyoto District Public Prosecutors Office appealed to the Osaka High Court on Oct 29 against the acquittal of a senior member of a designated organized crime group in the 2013 shooting death of the president of the company behind the Gyoza no Ohsho restaurant chain, the district court said. Prosecutors had sought life imprisonment for Yukio Tanaka, 60, a senior member of a gang affiliated with the Kudo-kai, a crime syndicate designated as especially dangerous under a 2012 prefectural ordinance in Fukuoka.
Takayuki Ohto, then 72 and president of Ohsho Food Service, was shot dead in Kyoto in December 2013. Tanaka faced charges of murder and violating the Firearms and Swords Control Law.
What the court found
The district court acquitted Tanaka on Oct 16. In its ruling, it accepted that cigarette butts found near the scene were smoked by the defendant, but said it could not rule out that the real perpetrator brought them there to mislead investigators, or that Tanaka left them when he visited the site on orders to scout it.
The court concluded there was room for reasonable doubt that Tanaka carried out the killing.
The case turned on how to weigh circumstantial evidence: the cigarette butts, a stolen motorcycle on which traces of gunshot residue were detected, and security camera footage near Ohto's home. The court found each piece of evidence either had no power to support an inference that Tanaka was the gunman, or only a weak one.
Other cases in the news
In Okinawa, prosecutors indicted a man who is the former boyfriend of a woman killed after what police treated as stalking. The case is in Ginowan.
Hyogo prefectural police rearrested a former gang member on suspicion of murder over a series of shootings in Kobe, and said the case was not a dispute between organized crime groups.