Tokyo Police Arrest Suspect in Vandalism Spree That Destroyed 300 Copies of Anne Frank’s Book
by Joshua Levitt
Tokyo police have arrested a suspect in a long-running vandalism case that has seen 300 copies of Anne Franks’s The Diary of a Young Girl destroyed in Tokyo libraries since mid-February, the Japan Times reported on Thursday.
Police sources told the newspaper that a man, in his mid-thirties, was arrested after putting up a poster in a bookstore that had reported a case of vandalism of Anne Frank’s books the day before.
“The unemployed man has hinted at his involvement in the incidents, but his statements have so far been ambiguous and require further investigation, the sources said,” the newspaper reported.
Japan Times said that footage from security cameras showed the man wandering back and forth inside the bookstore, in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo, in February, when the bout of vandalism began.
Anne Frank, was a Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam, who wrote her diary while hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust. She died in a concentration camp and her father, who survived, found the diary and it was later published. The book was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009.