Five years after release, Nepali wrongly jailed in Japan for 15 years still hasn’t heard ‘sorry’
All those years in detention have taken a huge toll on Govinda Prasad Mainali
Govinda Prasad Mainali, a former restaurant employee in Japan who was convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence of killing a 39-year-old Japanese woman in 1997, also attended a civic meeting to call for the eradication of wrongful convictions.
The 51-year-old said Saturday he has “yet to receive an apology from Japanese police, prosecutors or judges”.
In an interview accompanied by his wife Radha, he called it “unreasonable and impermissible”.
He said he has visited popular tourist spots in Tokyo such as Shibuya and Odaiba during his trip, and wondered “why cases of wrongful convictions could occur in a wonderful country like this.”
Although some relatives and friends had told him not to return to Japan as it was “a dangerous country,” Mainali decided to visit because he has “done nothing wrong. I wanted to say thank you to the Japanese people who helped me.”
I was deprived of my youth, the most important time of my life