Tokyo: A 36-year-old Japanese man arrested for vandalising library copies of Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" will not be charged after he was found to be mentally incompetent, a report said on Thursday.
In March, police arrested the unidentified suspect following a rash of incidents which saw more than 300 copies of the diary -- or publications containing biographies of Anne Frank, Nazi persecution of Jews and related material -- torn at many public libraries around the Tokyo area.
The strange case sparked alarm over a rightward shift in Japanese politics, with the Israeli embassy in Japan responding by donating 300 copies of the diary to libraries and urging Japanese authorities to bring the perpetrator to justice.
Japanese prosecutors, however, have decided not to indict the unemployed man after a psychiatric examination determined he was mentally incompetent at the time, Jiji said, quoting sources familiar with the case.
The report could not be immediately confirmed.
Anne Frank's diary documented her family's experiences hiding in concealed rooms during the German occupation of the Netherlands where they settled in 1933.
They were caught and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Anne and her sister died of typhus in 1945.
Frank's diary was added to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation's Memory of the World Register in 2009.
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