crime

15-year-old boy arrested for Saitama school bomb threat

23 Comments

A 15-year-old boy was arrested on Sunday after sending an email to Iruma City's government home page last Thursday saying he had planted a bomb in a school in the city, and that he would detonate it if students turned up to entrance exams to be held the next day.

Police said the boy sent the email from the computer at his home in Iruma City just after 5.30 p.m. Thursday, which resulted in the city closing all of its 27 elementary and junior high schools on Friday.

No bomb was found but the boy was arrested for obstruction of business. Police said that the boy, a third-year junior high school student, has admitted to making the threat and regretted his actions, but provided no specific reason as to why he did it.

© News reports

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23 Comments
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Someone was not prepared for his exams.

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Its obvious he didn't want to take the test. C'mon, anyone whose ever been in school has at least "thought" of doing something like this, but...most (99%) of us will never do.

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Not such a bright kid I guess. Too dull to study for a test and too stupid to send an e-mail from his home without realizing he can be caught

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The entrance exam argument doesn't make sense, since only elementary and JHS were closed, and he would be applying for High school entrance exams (which are held later?)

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kids will be kids... nuisance rug rats.

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Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

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Everybody knows if you want to send a bomb threat, you send if from a gmail account at an internet cafe.

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bamboohat - You can probabably expect a knock at your door from the Secret Service any time now. In any case, it's a bit much to close down every school in the city from one anonymous email.

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Oh it happened in Saitama

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Maybe it was just his way of protesting the entrance exams. I doubt we have heard the end of this terror-activist.

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closing all of its 27 elementary and junior high schools

Why did the high schools remain open?

arrested for "obstruction of business" - strange.

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wow this kid just fails at life. obviously didnt study and wanted an out but was also so stupid he didnt realize how easy it is for them trace an e-mail. definitely a future celebrity on worlds dumbest criminals.

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What a loser.

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He couldn't have been arrested for uttering...er typing...a bomb threat? Maybe since he admitted it, he will be at least charged with it. But yeah, too dumb to do it in an untraceable way...maybe he wasn't dumb...maybe just wanted the attention.

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@ norinrad21 "Oh it happened in Saitama."*

Can someone please explain why this comment appears to be a put down against Saitama-ken min? Is this a common slight in the Kanto area? Is Saitama-ken Tokyo's "poorer cousin"? (I lived in Kansai long ago so don't know as much about the Kanto area. Did spend part of a summer with a lovely host family who lived in Iwatsuki-shi, Saitama-ken though.)

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As much as it is a stupid prank, this was in Saitama, so I am glad it was taken seriously because if it is gonna happen in Japan, Saitama is the place.

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sctaber56 Saitama

Complaining about Saitama is an irritating distraction posed by several JT readers. I wish they would stop. It is not relevant in this case - the child could have lived anywhere and committed the same act.

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yeah not v. bright but I don't know how many times I wished some major natural disaster happened in my school in my day.

provided no specific reason as to why he did it.

as if all would be forgiven then

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Ive been all over this country, and no one can convince me that Saitama is any more ugly or grey, or it's citizens any more crazy than anywhere else in Japan. You could pick up any town in Saitama and plop it down in Kyushu or Tohoku etc. and no one would know the difference.

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bamboohat, you would have to do better than that. internet cafe's make you register so you would have to show fake id, wear a costume, and they would still get your gmail account in a heart beat by tracing the ip to the cafe, then trace the server from there, with the time the provider would give them the gmail server and gmail would give up your mail in a heartbeat because they would have the time if it wasnt sitting in the cache on the ip server.... need to hack some boxes with spoofed ips n set up a proxy network of unsuspecting xp users...

you would think that with the amount of studying to get into high school here kids would be a bit more savvy ; )

I love all these digs at saitama ; ) its just unfair.. but it is the tacoma or chino of kanto ; )

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And here I was about to say "all quiet at the Saitama front"!

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This sort of thing is not all so unusual in the USA. Kids make bomb threats and such on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes it's to disrupt testing, sometimes just to get out of school, sometimes just for the fun of it. Of course sometimes there ARE bombs and mass-murder/suicide plots ... so authorities prefer to over-react. The antics of groups like al-Qaida make authorities even more nervous about bomb threats, so I can see why ALL the schools were closed down.

There seems a growing tendency towards 'extremist' solutions for even relatively trivial problems these days. What used to provoke harsh language or a fist fight is now settled with knives, guns and bombs. I suspect it has something to do with "over-control" ... layers of rules and laws that punish those lower-level responses to pressure, threats and abuses. The victims feel trapped, forced to do nothing ... until their anger becomes just too great and explodes with lethal intensity. It is not uncommon for these people to claim that the system seemed to be conspiring against them and aiding their tormentors.

Now in Jaoan ... academic pressures are very high. A student unprepared, or who thinks he/she is underprepared, for important exams can clearly be tempted to take a page from the al-Qaida playbook to temporarily forestall what they fear.

Alas, I think Japan has to keep putting great emphasis on academic achievement. It has become "The Technology Country" after all and its future depends on being at the leading/bleeding edge. If they don't keep pushing academic achievement, well, backsliding towards mediocricy is a lot easier than striving for excellence.

The USA slacked-off on pushing academics for a variety of political and economic reasons and overall excellence rapidly deteriorated. Various 'fixes' have been attempted, most recently the federal 'No Child Left Behind' initiative, but they have all failed, as so many grand government-managed plans often do.

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All the schools were closed because at the time they didn't know WHO the sender was and he only said "a school" had a bomb. As to why the high schools weren't closed - my guess is that they didn't have exams on the same day as the elementary/middle schools? Keep the kids away while the search is conducted.

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