The rape and murder of a 20 year old Japanese university student in Romania has prompted the internship organization that arranged her travel to set up a panel to evaluate their safety measures. The Japan branch of AIESEC organized the travel and internship for Yurika Masuno, but when she arrived at the airport in Bucharest in August, she found she needed to travel to the nearest train station in order to get to her destination several hours away. She then got into a taxi with a 26 year old native of the area, who was later arrested for raping and strangling her.

AIESEC says its panel will be staffed by experts of crisis-management, and among the changes they plan to make in order to prevent such a tragedy from happening again are creating a formal list of people in host countries who will pick up arriving interns, methods of transportation available, and increasing the level of English proficiency for applying candidates. While the nonprofit organization made little acknowledgement over what happened to Masuno, AIESEC Japan has suspended its overseas internship programs since her death, and hopes to resume once new safety measures are in place.

Officials with AIESEC Japan say there was poor communication with those in Romania, as they understood that Masuno could travel to her destination, the city of Craiova, by train directly from the Bucharest airport. She spoke to Romanian representatives by phone, and they informed her the closest train station was not nearby, and she should use a taxi. It is understood that Vlad Nicolae approached Masuno at the airport that night, and offered to escort her to her destination. The taxi driver, who had no involvement in the young woman’s death, was told to go in the opposite direction of the train station, and dropped the two off in a wooded area by the side of the road, where Nicolae raped and killed Masuno.