TOKYO: Japanese police are probing allegations that a US serviceman assaulted a teenager after breaking into his home in Okinawa, reports said yesterday, despite a nationwide military curfew.
The allegations come just weeks after the United States put all 47,000 of its military staff stationed in Japan under an indefinite nighttime curfew in response to the alleged rape of an Okinawan woman by two US servicemen. The pair were arrested last month.
The rape case stoked already high tensions in Okinawa, which has seen angry demonstrations against the US deployment to the island of the tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft, which local activists charge has a poor safety record.
Yesterday, public broadcaster NHK and other Japanese media said the unidentified 24-year-old serviceman entered an apartment above the village pub where he had been drinking and then slapped a teenage resident.
The soldier, who allegedly became violent at the bar before the incident early yesterday morning, then jumped out the home’s third-floor window, sustaining injuries that required hospitalisation, reports said.
Police in Okinawa could not immediately confirm the reports.
AFP
