A man has been arrested for threatening to bomb the US embassy in Tokyo, days after reports ambassador Caroline Kennedy received telephone death threats.
Officers took Mitsuyoshi Kamiya, 52, into custody on the southern island of Okinawa on Thursday, on suspicion of making three calls to the embassy mentioning bombs earlier this month, a police spokesman said.
"Bomb Camp Schwab (in Okinawa). Bomb embassy," he said in English on the phone, according to the spokesman.
Camp Schwab, a US military base on Okinawa, is the site to which an air station is set to be relocated.
The plan has attracted vociferous opposition from many islanders, who feel hosting half the 47,000 US military personnel in Japan is too heavy a burden.
Mired in protests for years, it is the focus of much of the friction between Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, and the central government in Tokyo.
Kamiya admitted making the bomb telephone calls, the police spokesman said. He has not presently been charged with threatening to kill the ambassador.
Kennedy, the last surviving child of assassinated US president John F. Kennedy, took up her post in Tokyo in November 2013 as the first woman US ambassador to Japan.
Japanese television station NTV reported Monday that Japanese police were investigating death threats made by an anonymous caller against her.
A man speaking in English phoned the embassy "multiple times last month, saying he would kill Ambassador Kennedy", NTV reported.
US officials said they had been co-operating with Japanese authorities on the bomb and death threat calls for some time.
"We are working and have been working for several weeks with the Japanese government on these reports, these threats," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington.
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