Photo/Illutration The Kobe Family Court in Kobe city (Shuya Iwamoto)

KOBE--Records pertaining to a notorious 14-year-old serial killer in Kobe in 1997 were discarded by a family court here in violation of a Supreme Court notice that said such vital documents should be kept.

Experts say that the court’s failure to keep the records means that a way to scrutinize the attacks, in which two of the five young victims died, was lost to society.

Officials of the Kobe Family Court have admitted that their handling of the records “was not appropriate.”

The Supreme Court requires lower courts to keep records of cases indefinitely if they have attracted much attention in society or meet other conditions.

In the infamous case, five children were attacked in Kobe city between February 1997 and May 1997.

Of the five, Ayaka Yamashita, who was a 10-year-old elementary school fourth-grader, and Jun Hase, who was an 11-year-old sixth-grade elementary school student, died.

In June 1997, a newspaper company received a letter from a sender confessing to the killings, who identified himself as “Seito Sakakibara.”

On June 28, 1997, a 14-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of murder and other charges.

After a trial, he was sent to an institution for mentally or physically ill young offenders. He was discharged from the institution in 2015.

According to the court, it lost documents concerning the killer, including a ruling of his trial at the court, records of his confessions compiled by the Hyogo prefectural police and the Kobe District Public Prosecutors Office, and a psychiatric evaluation on him conducted by experts, among other materials.

Court officials say that they haven’t determined yet when and how these documents were thrown away.

A rule set by the Supreme Court requires that records of juvenile crimes be kept until offenders reach the age of 26, apart from some exceptions.

At the same time, a Supreme Court notice to lower courts in 1992 said that such records must be kept as a special measure even after offenders turn 26 if the crimes reflect society at the time and such records are valuable historical documents, or if the crimes attract much attention across the nation.

The child murders in Kobe had a major impact on society as it led the government to lower the minimum age of offenders punishable under the Criminal Law from 16 to 14, for example.

Officials of the Kobe Family Court told the media that, considering the "special measure" rule, they believe that their handling of the records of the killings was “not appropriate."

Records of juvenile crimes are not open to the public.

However, Yasuhiro Igaki, who was the judge in the child murders trial at the Kobe Family Court, caused controversy in 2015 by publishing his ruling in the case in a monthly magazine.

The ruling explained his decision to send the killer to an institution for mentally or physically ill young offenders.

His book titled “Shonen Saibankan Note (A note by a judge of juvenile crimes)” said about the case, “Documents about the case were sent to me in four cardboard boxes by the public prosecutors office. They were more than two meters high when stacked. There were huge amount of exhibits, too.”

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