The District Public Prosecutor’s Office of Osaka dropped charges against 43-year-old anime technical director Masaki Kitamura on Friday. The television station TBS revealed on Monday that it received an October 10 email from a person who claimed to be the “real criminal” behind the virus that enabled massacre threats to be sent from other people’s computers.
Officials released Kitamura on October 6 after determining that Kitamura’s computer was infected by a virus that allowed a third party to remotely access his PC.
The authorities arrested Kitamura in August. They had accused him of going to Osaka’s inquiry page on the Internet and writing, “I will commit a massacre in Otaroad [in Osaka’s Nipponbashi area] next Sunday. I will ram into pedestrian paradise, and after stabbing indiscriminately with a knife, I will commit suicide” on July 29 at about 9:45 p.m.
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