[/floatl]Yomiuri: Man charged in JR train rapes of female crew
Prosecutors have charged a 34-year-old man from Kawasaki Ward, Kawasaki, on suspicion of raping a female crew member on a first-class JR train carriage in early April, and of injuring another female crew member during an attempted rape on aboard a train about a week before, it has been learned. The man targeted early-morning trains with low passenger ridership. After the incidents, East Japan Railway Co. increased the number of security cameras on conventional railway lines and guards who patrol the trains. According to a senior officer of Tobe Police Station in Yokohama and a written indictment, Takuya Imai shoved a female crew member in her 20s into a restroom near a first-class car on a JR Tokaido Line train and raped her on the early morning of April 2. On the early morning of March 27, Imai choked another crew member in her 20s while attempting to rape her inside a restroom adjacent to a first-class car on the line. She suffered injuries to her neck. Imai told her he would kill her if she did not obey him. Imai was working at hostess bars in Takadanobaba and Ginza in Tokyo at the time and was using the train to go home to Kawasaki from Tokyo Station, according to sources. He was reported by the sources as saying: "I knew female crew members were present in the first-class carriages and so I targeted them. I thought no one would notice because few passengers rode the train at that hour." The police arrested Imai at his home April 3, the day after the rape, after he used the train to return home as usual. Imai also confessed to the police that he raped a woman in her 20s at a parking lot in Kawasaki in mid March, the police said. After the incidents, JR East began to dispatch two female crew members to work together on trains in the early-morning and nighttime hours.
