"The High Court has scrapped the review petition filed by a government attorney against Govinda on Tuesday. We are very happy and believe that he will be acquitted from the murder charge very soon," a happy Indra Prasad, Govinda´s brother said.[break]
Mainali, who had been serving a life sentence in a Japanese jail in a high-profile murder case 15 years ago, walked a free man after the Tokyo High Court ordered a retrial. A government attorney had filed a review petition challenging the court´s decision.
Earlier, High Court Judge Shoji Ogawa based his ruling on new DNA testing which suggests that Mainali, who was serving life for murdering 39-year-old Yasuko Watanabe, a female employee of Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) in 1997, may be innocent.
Mainali, who left Nepal for Japan in 1994, worked as a waiter in Tokyo until police arrested him in March 1997. He was first held on the charge of overstaying and then on the charge of murdering Watanabe, who moonlighted as a prostitute and was killed on March 8, 1997.
Tokyo District Court found him not guilty in April, 2000. But the prosecution, presenting selective evidence, appealed at Tokyo High Court, which found him guilty and jailed him for life on circumstantial evidence, deeming that a third party could not conceivably have entered the murder victim´s room.
Tokyo High Court ordered a re-examination of evidence last year following a request for retrial as two crucial pieces of evidence, which were evidently not presented by the prosecution back then, had emerged.
DNA tests in July, 2011 showed that a semen sample collected from the woman´s body was not Mainali´s and instead matched a body hair sample found in the room where the woman´s body was found, suggesting the presence of another man at the time of the murder. Then came the revelation later in the year that the blood group of saliva traces found on Watanabe´s breast does not match that of Mainali. The saliva blood type is O, while his is B.
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