Japanese man arrested over drone found on PM’s office roof

TOKYO: A Japanese man was arrested on Saturday for allegedly flying a small drone with traces of radioactivity onto the roof of the Japanese prime minister’s office, police said.
Yasuo Yamamoto, 40, turned himself in to local police in Fukui prefecture, some 350-km west of Tokyo, late on Friday night with an apparent drone controller, saying he did it to express his anti-nuclear power stance, according to local media.
The unemployed man blogged that the drone had carried sand from Fukushima — where nuclear reactors went into meltdown after the 2011 tsunami — and a card voicing his opposition to atomic energy, reports said.
Yamamoto faces a charge of “forcible obstruction of business” by having officials deal with the drone, said a spokesman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
The man was being transported to Tokyo for questioning, he added.
“The suspect planned to disrupt operations at the prime minister’s official residence”, the spokesman said.
The drone was sent with a bottle with a radiation marking sometime between March 22 and April 22, when it was found, he said, without elaborating further.
Staff at the official residence — known as “the Kantei” — discovered the 50-centimetre (20-inch) craft on top of the five-storey structure in central Tokyo Wednesday morning.
Traces of radiation were detected but were reportedly too low to be a risk to human health.
In a blog, identified by local media as Yamomoto’s, the writer said he put contaminated sand from Fukushima into the bottle and claims to have sent the drone to the prime minister’s office at around 3:30 am on April 9.