Okinawa governor demands meeting with Obama following latest heinous crime by U.S. base-linked personnel

The Governor of Okinawa, Takeshi Onaga, said Thursday he has requested a meeting with soon-to-be visiting U.S. President Barack Obama concerning the recent arrest of a male civilian working for the U.S. military in the prefecture, for his alleged raping, strangling and dumping of the body of a local woman.

Onaga, a staunch opponent to a controversial plan to relocate a U.S. military facility within Japan's southernmost prefecture and an advocate for lightening the U.S. base-hosting burdens of the people of Okinawa, told Prime Minister Shinzo Abe he wanted him to set up the meeting with Obama.

Onaga, at a press briefing Thursday, also told local media that he had demanded an immediate"drastic" review of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement, which, in part, decrees how U.S. military and military-affiliated personnel are dealt with in Japan.

"As governor of Okinawa Prefecture, which hosts the bulk of U.S. military bases in Japan, I would very much like to directly speak to President Obama so as to ensure the safety of prefectural residents' lives and property, as well as of children and grandchildren in the future,"Onaga was quoted as saying.

"We can never tolerate such an incident. This is a crime simply because U.S. military bases exist in Okinawa. I lodge a strong protest against it,"the governor added.

But Abe's top spokesperson Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshida Suga said after Onaga's meeting with the Japanese premier that arranging a meeting between the pair might be difficult and that such issues"related to security and diplomacy should be discussed between the central governments of countries involved."

Abe has indicated his own intentions to discuss the matter with Obama, with the talk likely to take place on the sidelines of a two-day Group of Seven leaders' summit starting this Thursday in Mie Prefecture, central Japan, to which Obama will be attending and Abe hosting.

Abe has expressed his own indignation over the latest crime involving a U.S. military-linked personnel in Okinawa and will demand the visiting president take effective measures to prevent such an incident from happening again.

Police arrested 32-year-old Kenneth Franklin Shinzato, a former U.S. Marine and resident of Yonabaru Town in the southwestern prefecture, on May 19, following evidence leading them to find he had dumped the dead body of 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro in a forested area in Onna Village on the night of April 28 or in the early hours of the morning thereafter.

Shimabukuro, a company employee working in Uruma city, went missing on April 28 after going for a walk, investigative sources said, with the official filing of her disappearance being made the following day to the police by her boyfriend.

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

The former Marine was subsequently questioned by the police, of his own volition, as he was potentially in the same area as Shimabukuro according to GPS data triangulated from her phone and based on traffic records. He allowed the police to inspect his car.

Following the police questioning and ongoing searches for Shimabukuro, police said they had identified a body as being that of the missing woman and had identified her by both dental and DNA records.

Shinzato, who works at the U.S. Air Force's Kadena Air Base and lives with his wife and child, admitted to the police he dumped the corpse in the wooded area after she stopped moving and that he had in fact raped and strangled her. The accused, according to investigative sources, also tried to take his own life following the attack, investigative sources said, and was hospitalized for a drug and alcohol overdose thought to be a suicide attempt, around the time he was being questioned.

Police found DNA matching Shimabukuro's in the accused car, investigative sources also confirmed.

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

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

The latest murder and previous attacks have led to strong condemnation from the people of Okinawa and has seen instances of growing anti-U.S. sentiment on the island amid increasing tensions between the central government and prefectural officials about a Japan and U.S.-sanctioned plan to relocate a controversial U.S. base within the island.

To try and appease the situation, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, is planning to visit Okinawa to hold talks with Onaga, possibly this week, government sources said Monday, and deliver an official apology from the U.S. for the latest incident to the people of Okinawa.

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, with local citizens becoming increasingly irate at their base-hosting burdens and the central government's ongoing pandering to the U.S.'s requests, amid rising instances of crime, noise and pollution connected to the bases.

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been steadily rising on the island, and spiked in 1995, when an elementary schoolgirl was savagely gang-raped by three U.S. servicemen. Enditem