U.S. civilian working for military questioned over disappearance of woman in Okinawa

A male civilian working for the U.S. military in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, was questioned Thursday by police over the disappearance of a Japanese women last month, local media reports said.

The woman, Rina Shimabukuro, the reports said, comes from Uruma in Okinawa Prefecture, which hosts four U.S. military bases.

Local reports said she went missing on April 28 after going for a walk, with the official filing of her disappearance being made the following day to the police.

The police said suspicions were raised as she left home without her car or wallet.

The man being questioned by the police, of his own volition, was potentially in the same area as Shimabukuro according to GPS data triangulated from her phone and based on traffic records, local sources said, adding that the suspect had allowed the police to inspect his car.

The latest case follows a U.S. Navy sailor being arrested in March after raping a woman in a hotel in Naha, the capital of Okinawa.

The sailor, 24-year-old Justin Castellanos, was based at the U.S. Marines' Camp Schwab in northern the northern part of the island.

Okinawa hosts some 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan, yet the tiny sub-tropical island accounts for less than 1 percent of the county's total land mass. Local residents became increasingly irate at their base-hosting burdens and the central government's ongoing pandering to the U.S. requests, amid rising instances of crime, noise and pollution connected to the bases. Enditem