AFP: Russia probes Japanese envoy's stabbing
Police on the Russian island of Sakhalin said on Wednesday they were investigating a knife attack on the head of a Japanese cultural centre, RIA Novosti reported. The investigation was launched after 67-year-old Takayuki Nasu was stabbed in the stomach and needed hospital treatment in the Japanese city of Sapporo, a police official on Sakhalin said. Nasu was attacked by an unknown assailant in the stairway of his home in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Tuesday evening, an official with Russia's foreign ministry on the island said. His injuries were described as "moderately severe". Sakhalin is a sensitive area in Japanese-Russian relations as the two countries dispute the rights to four smaller islands seized by the Soviet Union at the close of World War Two, known as the Kurils in Russian and the Northern Territories in Japan.