Japanese court on Monday (January 19) sentenced a man, 29, to three years in prison, suspended for five years, for transporting a then high school student to Myanmar last year to get him to engage in fraud despite knowing that the boy had been kidnapped.
Public prosecutors had demanded a prison sentence of four years and six months for the defendant, Tomu Fujinuma.
Presiding Judge Yuichi Suda at Sendai District Court in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan, denounced the defendant, saying that transporting the student, including by ship, to a place from which he could not return by himself was “a malicious act.”
But Suda suspended the execution of the prison sentence, noting that Fujinuma admitted the allegations against him and that a settlement deal had already been reached with the victim.
According to the ruling, Fujinuma in January 2025 transported the male student, then 17, to Myanmar from Thailand, to which the boy had been kidnapped from Miyagi by an unidentified person, and then had him commit fraud at a fraud group hub in Myanmar.