Chinese held after attack on Japan’s Seoul embassy
Chinese held after attack on Japan’s Seoul embassy
South Korean police detained a Chinese man accused of throwing petrol bombs at the Japanese embassy in Seoul on Sunday after claiming his grandmother was forced into wartime sex slavery.
The man also claimed responsibility for an arson attack last month on Japan’s controversial Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, said police in Seoul, who are checking his family background and past trips to Japan.
In the latest incident, the 38-year-old lobbed four molotov cocktails at the Japanese embassy, leaving burn marks on part of the outer wall, police in the South Korean capital told AFP.
“He said his deceased maternal grandmother was a ‘comfort woman’ and he was angry at the Japanese government for its refusal to properly deal with the issue,” a police officer said.
The man was from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou and entered South Korea last month via Japan on a tourist visa, police said.
Known as “comfort women”, historians say that about 200,000 women from Korea, China, the Philippines and other countries were drafted to work in Japanese army brothels.
Japan insists the issue was settled legally four decades ago but Tokyo is coming under new pressure from South Korea to compensate elderly victims before the last of them die.
The Yasukuni shrine is dedicated to 2.5 million Japanese killed in wars — including top World War II criminals — and is often seen as a symbol of the country’s wartime aggression.
Its main wooden gate was set on fire and suffered minor damage on December 26.
Categorised as: Regional News