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10-year-old Japanese girl behind online death threat
Thu, Mar 06, 2008 The Straits Times
TOKYO - A GIRL, 10, who posted a message on the Internet warning that she was planning to kill another girl has been tracked down, Japanese police said yesterday. She had posted the notice on an Internet message board last month saying: 'I'm going to kill an elementary school girl on Feb 29 at 1pm' in the Tokyo suburb of Saitama. She was tracked down after an Internet user spotted the message and contacted the police. Because of her age, she was referred for counselling and was not arrested.

'The girl said she wrote that to play a prank. She didn't know it would cause such trouble,' he said.

The girl is Web-savvy as she has been surfing the Internet at home for the past two years, he added.

'I assume she came across sites that had similar notices as the one she put up,' Mr Sakuma said.

According to him, the girl's parents were completely baffled by their daughter's action and said she was 'usually calm and not in the least bit a troublemaker'.

'The parents were aware their daughter surfed the Internet and so explained to her not to do such things,' Mr Sakuma said.

She is believed to be the youngest person investigated by the police in a spate of similar Internet threat cases in Japan.

Last month, police arrested a 32-year-old man for a similar online threat to kill a young girl. His threat had triggered a security alert in suburban Tokyo.

Tsutomu Fukuda, an unemployed man with no fixed address, allegedly posted the threat on a popular Internet bulletin board.

'I wrote the message because the reactions are interesting,' police quoted him as saying.

The Internet and mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous in Japan, even for the young.

A recent survey found that about 60 per cent of 14-year-old students carried mobile phones, and half of them used their phones to send 20 or more e-mail messages a day.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE