A 31-year-old Pakistani man has been arrested for sexual assault on a female high school student on a train near Takao, West Tokyo.
Muhammad Afzal is accused of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl as the second grader slept on a train on the JR Chuo Line in August, and then of taking her to a nearby copse and raping her.
According to a police statement reported in the media on Wednesday and Thursday, Muhammad Afzal groped the girl’s chest and took her underwear off.
When the train reached Takao, where it terminated, Afzal allegedly took the girl’s bag and then forcibly carried her to a deserted grove some 500 or 600 meters away from the station.
The girl managed to escape back into a train and seek help from station staff. The suspect was then identified by security camera footage.
Afzal, who is a student and lives in Akishima, Tokyo, has claimed that the girl consented.
The incident took place in the early afternoon of August 22 but has only now come to light, presumably because it took some time to find the suspect.
We were hesitant to publish this story because we don’t want to stoke any racist flames at a time of increasing migration and tourism in Japan and when a lot of nasty rhetoric is floating around the interwebs and mainstream media. Before people start to engage in baseless speculation about Asian migrants coming to Japan and committing lots of crime, let’s remember that the vast majority of sexual assault is done by Japanese citizens.
Just to give one recent example, the politician Tamotsu Shiiki was arrested a few days ago for sexually assaulting a junior high school student in a karaoke establishment in Kabukicho, Shinjuku.
The 58-year-old had served two terms in the House of Representatives, Japan’s lower house, in the 2010s, though his attempts to seek public office since 2017 have all failed. We doubt he will be trying again.
