Tokyo police make arrest in Anne Frank vandalism

Unemployed man admits involvement in damage to hundreds of copies of Holocaust diary around Japanese capital

By JTA 13 March 2014, 10:27 pm

Edit

Ripped copies of Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl' and related books are shown at Shinjuku City Library in Tokyo, on Friday, February 21, 2014. (AP/Koji Ueda)

Tokyo police reportedly arrested a city resident in connection with the vandalism of hundreds of copies of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in the Japanese capital’s libraries.

The suspect, identified in the announcement Wednesday of his arrest as an “unemployed man in his 30s,” in a statement admitted to some involvement in the vandalism of the books in February, according to Rocket News 24, citing the Japanese-language MSN Sankei News.

Police arrested the man on March 7 for entering a bookstore in the Ikebukuro district to hang a poster without permission. It is not known what the posters said.

Footage from the store’s security cameras reportedly showed the same man wandering back and forth inside the same bookstore through sections dealing with the Holocaust, including the day that some of the damage occurred.

Police spotted the man in security footage from other locations where vandalism occurred, according to Sankei. They confiscated his cellphone and computer.