THE JAPAN TIMES – February 25, 2016 – SAPPORO – Public prosecutors on Wednesday indicted three officials of Hokkaido Railway Co., or JR Hokkaido, for submitting false track inspection data over a freight train derailment in violation of the railway business law.
The railway company was also indicted.
The three individuals are Yoshihito Okushiba, 53, deputy head of the engineering department of JR Hokkaido’s railway business headquarters, and two lower-ranking officials from the same department.
All three deny the charges, according to investigation sources, and they were indicted without being taken into custody.
In the accident, which occurred on Sept. 19, 2013, a freight train came off a sidetrack at Onuma Station on the Hakodate Main Line in the Hokkaido town of Nanae. The driver of the train suffered no injury.
The three officials and the company are suspected of submitting falsified inspection data on the track at the derailment site and other sections to the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry and the Japan Transport Safety Board.
Also on Wednesday, prosecutors filed a summary indictment against 14 JR Hokkaido employees, including those who were in charge of track maintenance at the time of the accident, for professional negligence and a breach of the railway business law.
They are alleged to have left the track at the accident site unattended, despite the fact that the track gauge was far wider than the level at which repairs are required, causing the freight train to derail.
The national government in February 2014 filed a criminal complaint with the Hokkaido police department while being unable to identify those responsible. The police sent papers on 20 individuals and the company to prosecutors in December 2015.
JR Hokkaido, a Japan Railways Group company born of the April 1987 breakup and privatization of the Japanese National Railways, is fully owned by the government-affiliated Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency.