News Rendezvous

The world’s longest-serving death row prisoner has been acquitted after a Japanese court ruled that key evidence had been fabricated.

Ailing health prevented 88-year-old former boxer Iwao Hakamada from being in the court to learn the outcome of his retrial, which was granted a decade ago after a long campaign by supporters.

Hakamada spent 46 years on death row after being convicted in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.

“Investigators tampered with clothes by getting blood on them” which they then hid in a tank of miso, said the ruling from the Shizuoka District Court .