Japanese officials freed a 62-year-old man from prison after more than 17 years following new DNA tests that indicated he was innocent of the crime for which he was jailed, the murder of a four-year-old girl.
Toshikazu Sugaya, a former bus driver for a kindergarten, smiled and waved from a car as he was taken from the prison near Tokyo, ending his time behind bars since his 1991 arrest.
Mr Sugaya was arrested in December 1991 for allegedly kidnapping a four-year-old girl from a pachinko game parlour in Ashikaga, north of Tokyo, in May 1990.
The girl's body was found in a nearby river bed the next day.
The bus driver was convicted and received a life term in 1993, a sentence last upheld in 2000, in part because an initial DNA test was found to have detected his bodily fluids on the dead girl's underwear.
Mr Sugaya's lawyers had demanded another DNA test, arguing that the forensic tests were unreliable in the early 1990s, and last December the Tokyo High Court ordered the second set of the genetic tests.
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