Bomb threats at Japanese universities in row over 'comfort women' issue

Two universities that employed former journalists of the left-leaning Asahi newspaper have received threats that their premises will be bombed and their students harmed.

Both journalists were involved in the paper's coverage of the "comfort women" issue in the 1990s, although the Asahi has in recent weeks been forced to retract many of its stories because they were based on testimony that has since been discredited.

Letters have been sent to Tezukayama Gakuin University, in Osaka prefecture, and Hokusei Gakuen University, in Hokkaido, demanding that the two former journalists be sacked.

Local media have reported that the letters contained messages that read: "If you fail to dismiss him, your students will get hurt" and "A gas bomb containing nails will be set off". Some of the letters also contained nails.

Police are looking into the letters, which arrived at the two universities at about the same time as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addressed the Diet on the matter of the Asahi's coverage of the "comfort women" issue.

Abe was responding to a question on Friday from Tomomi Inada, the chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's Policy Research Council, who is among those who deny that the Japanese army forced women from across Asia into sexual slavery in the early decades of the last century.

"The groundless defamation of Japan as 'a state that was involved in sexual slavery' has spread globally," the prime minister told the house. "It is also a fact that such a situation resulted from false reports."