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Los Angeles: A Japanese businessman has been arrested on suspicion of murder more than a quarter-century after an infamous downtown shooting that left his wife dead and sparked an international furore, police said.
Kazuyoshi Miura, 60, had already been convicted in Japan in 1994 of the murder of his wife, Kazumi Miura, but that verdict was overturned by the country's high courts 10 years ago.
Miura was arrested on Friday while visiting Saipan, a US commonwealth territory in the Pacific, after cold-case detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department worked with authorities there and in Guam, police said in a brief statement.
"A murder suspect who has been eluding [the] dragnet has been finally captured," the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said. "Miura's extradition is pending."
Officer April Harding, a department spokeswoman, said no other details were available.
Attorney astonished
Miura's attorney Junichiro Hironaka told Japan's Fuji TV late on Saturday that the arrest "astonished" him.
"My understanding was that the case was already closed both in Japan and the US, especially after their joint investigation," Hironaka said. "It's quite a surprise."
Miura and his wife were visiting Los Angeles on November 18, 1981, when they were shot in a parking lot. Miura was hit in the right leg, while his 28-year-old wife was shot in the head.
His wife remained in a coma and was taken in an Air Force hospital jet to Japan, where she eventually died. Miura blamed street robbers on the attack and railed from his hospital bed against what he called a violent city.
The incident reinforced Japanese stereotypes of violence in the US at a time when Los Angeles was preparing for the 1984 Olympics and was particularly sensitive about its overseas image. The LAPD vowed to find the killers.
Daryl Gates, who was police chief at the time of the killing, said on Saturday that Miura was a key suspect even then.
"I remember the case well. I think he killed his wife," said Gates, who had not heard about Miura's arrest before he spoke on Saturday afternoon.
"We had Japanese police come over; they believed he was guilty, we believed he was guilty, but we couldn't prove it." Miura, a clothing importer who travelled regularly to the US, had said he would write to then-President Reagan and then-Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. and urge them to make the city safer.
Image tarnished
"Many young Japanese will be coming to the US with their dreams in their hearts," Miura said at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. "I strongly hope this accident will never occur again." In 1984, however, Miura's image as a grieving husband was tarnished by a series of news articles in Japan.
Miura reportedly collected about $1.4 million (Dh5.13 million) at today's exchange rate on life insurance policies he had taken out on his wife. In addition, an actress who claimed to be Miura's lover told a newspaper that Miura had hired her to kill his wife in their hotel room on a trip to LA three months before the shootings.
Miura was arrested in Japan in 1985 on suspicion of assaulting his wife with intent to kill her for insurance money in the hotel incident. He was convicted of attempted murder and while serving a six-year sentence was charged under Japanese law in 1988 with his wife's murder.
Miura was convicted of that charge in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison. Four years later, however, a Japanese high court overturned the sentence, throwing out a lower court's determination that Miura conspired with a friend in Los Angeles to kill his wife.
News of Miura''s arrest made front-page headlines in Japan.
"Why now?" asked the Mainichi newspaper.
A duty official at Japan's National Police Agency said that there was no notice from US authorities before the arrest and that the news surprised him.
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