A Japanese man was arrested in Japan on Wednesday for allegedly paying to have sex with a 15-year-old girl in a Phnom Penh brothel, photographing the abuse and posting it on his Web site, according to a news report.
Issei Hara, a 28-year-old employee of a computer training school, admitted to police that he paid $100 to have sex with the girl in late 2003, Kyodo news agency quoted Japanese police as saying.
Police in Fukuoka, southern Japan, began investigating the case late last year when a police investigator found pornographic photos of the young girl, apparently taken at the unidentified brothel.
The pictures had been posted on a Web site that Hara was allegedly running. According to Kyodo, police said the suspect confessed that he had sex with the teenager Dec 24, 2003, and took digital photos of the abuse.
Officials at the Japanese Embassy in Phnom Penh could not be reached for comment and Interior Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant General Khieu Sopheak said he was unfamiliar with the case and also declined comment.
Anti-pedophile NGO International Justice Mission said there has been improvement over the past year in foreign governments’ attitudes toward their nationals coming to Cambodia to sexually abuse children.
“Cooperation with the Germans, the French, the Japanese and the Thais has improved this year,” an IJM official said on condition of anonymity. He said that with regards to Thailand the improvement may be due to increased cooperation between Thai and Cambodian officials to combat all levels of cross-border crime.
Other foreign countries, the IJM official said, may be responding more positively because of the embarrassment of seeing their citizens in the news for sex crimes with children overseas. sentenced a German national, Alexander Moritz Watrin, to 10 years in prison for sexually abusing four teenaged boys in the seaside resort town.
