Three former Japanese soldiers have been found guilty of sexually assaulting a female colleague who gained international attention after she spoke about her ordeal in a YouTube video.
Rina Gonoi, who said she was subjected to persistent harassment after joining the Self-Defense Forces in 2020, alleged the three men pinned her to the ground, pulled her legs apart and pressed their crotches against her in simulation of a sex act in 2021.
She complained to her superiors at the time of the incident but later decided to leave the army when no action was taken.
Ms Gonoi, now 24, then went public with her accusations in a YouTube video in 2022, a rare move in a conservative society where speaking out against sexual violence has remained largely taboo.
The video went viral and she collected more than 100,000 signatures for a petition calling on Japan’s defence ministry to investigate her case.
The defence ministry later issued a public apology and announced that five men connected to the incident had been dismissed and four others punished.
The ministry also began a widespread survey of harassment in the military and military-linked entities that found more than 1,400 complaints.
Ms Gonoi’s fight for justice attracted international recognition, with Time Magazine naming her on its list of 100 emerging world leaders and the BBC including her among its 100 most influential women globally.
The defendants seemed to show little expression as the judge read out his verdicts on Tuesday, giving them each a suspended sentence of two years.
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Ms Gonoi told reporters outside the district court in Fukushima: “I think it was good for Japan’s society that the court handed down a guilty verdict and accepted the claims that I’ve made from the very beginning.”
Pausing mid-sentence to regain her composure, she added: “(The verdict) shows that it’s not OK to do things for a laugh, that such acts are an actual crime.”
Despite the support she received from around the world, Ms Gonoi was targeted with online abuse by some in Japan.
Chelsea Szendi Schieder, a professor of Japanese history at Tokyo’s Aoyama Gakuin University, said: “The hurdles are incredibly high in Japan to be able to come out publicly and that has to do with…the kind of backlash a woman gets when she speaks out about these issues.
“It is a really important verdict that I hope has a lot of organisations within Japan re-evaluating their internal systems.”
Ms Gonoi has also lodged a civil case against her former peers and the government, seeking damages for the alleged assault and the subsequent inaction despite her complaints.
The cases come at an awkward time for Japan, which is trying to recruit more women soldiers into its forces and build up its military to deter an increasingly assertive China and nuclear-armed North Korea.
There are mechanisms to protect the regime in events like this and the Revolutionary Guard, which was founded in 1979 precisely for that purpose, will be a major player in what comes next.
In the immediate term, vice-president Mohammed Mokhber will assume control and elections will be held within 50 days.
Mokhber isn’t as close to the supreme leader as Raisi was, and won’t enjoy his standing, but he has run much of Khamenei’s finances for years and is credited with helping Iran evade some of the many sanctions levied on it.
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Drone footage of helicopter crash site
Raisi’s successor will most likely be the chosen candidate of the supreme leader and certainly another ultra-conservative hardliner – a shift back to the moderates is highly unlikely.
Likewise, we shouldn’t expect any significant change in Iran’s foreign activities or involvement with the war in Gaza. It will be business as usual, as much as possible.
However, after years of anti-government demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, this might be a moment for the protest movement to rise up and take to the streets again.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has died after the helicopter he was travelling in crashed in a mountainous area of northwest Iran.
Rescuers found the burned remains of the aircraft on Monday morning after the president and his foreign minister had been missing for more than 12 hours.
“President Raisi, the foreign minister and all the passengers in the helicopter were killed in the crash,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Iran‘s Mehr news agency reported “all passengers of the helicopter carrying the Iranian president and foreign minister were martyred”.
State TV said images showed it had smashed into a mountain peak, although there was no official word on the cause of the crash.
“President Raisi’s helicopter was completely burned in the crash… unfortunately, all passengers are feared dead,” an official told Reuters.
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President of Iran killed in crash
As the sun rose, rescuers saw the wreckage from around 1.25 miles, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, told state media.
Iranian news agency IRNA said the president was flying in an American-made Bell 212 helicopter.
Mr Raisi, 63, who was seen as a frontrunner to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, was travelling back from Azerbaijan where he had opened a dam with the country’s president.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, also died in the crash.
The governor of East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards were also said to have been on board when the helicopter crashed in fog on Sunday.
Iranian media initially described it as a “hard landing”.
The chief of staff of Iran’s army had ordered all military resources and the Revolutionary Guard to be deployed in the search, which had been hampered by bad weather.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to react to the news of Mr Raisi’s death.
“India stands with Iran in this time of sorrow,” he said in a post on X.
A helicopter carrying Iran’s president crashed during bad weather on Sunday.
But who is Ebrahim Raisi – a leader who faces sanctions from the US and other nations over his involvement in the mass execution of prisoners in 1988.
The president, 63, who was travelling alongside the foreign minister and two other key Iranian figures when their helicopter crashed, had been travelling across the far northwest of Iran following a visit to Azerbaijan.
Mr Raisi is a hardliner and former head of the judiciary who some have suggested could one day replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Because of his part in the sentencing of thousands of prisoners of conscience to death back in the 1980s, he was nicknamed the Butcher of Tehranas he sat on the so-called Death Panel, for which he was then sanctioned by the US.
Both a revered and a controversial figure, Mr Raisi supported the country’s security services as they cracked down on all dissent, including in the aftermath of the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini – the woman who died after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly – and the nationwide protests that followed.
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The months-long security crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iranwas responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Ms Amini’s death after her arrest for not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.
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The president also supported Iran’s unprecedented decision in April to launch a drone and missile attack on Israel amid its war with Hamas, the ruling militant group in Gaza responsible for the 7 October attacks which saw 1,200 people killed in southern Israel.
Involvement in mass executions
Mr Raisi is sanctioned by the US in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Under the president, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections.
Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraineand has continued arming proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
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He successfully ran for the presidency back in August 2021 in a vote that got the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history as all of his potentially prominent opponents were barred from running under Iran’s vetting system.
A presidency run in 2017 saw him lose to Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate cleric who as president reached Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
‘Very involved in anything’
Alistair Bunkall, Sky News’s Middle East correspondent, said the president is “a major figure in Iranian political and religious society” but “he’s not universally popular by any means” as his administration has seen a series of protests in the past few years against his and the government’s “hardline attitude”.
Mr Raisi is nonetheless “considered one of the two frontrunners to potentially take over” the Iranian regime when the current supreme leader dies, Bunkall said.
He added the president would have been “instrumental” in many of Iran’s activities in the region as he “would’ve been very involved in anything particularly what has been happening in Israel and the surrounding areas like Lebanon and Gaza and the Houthis over the last seven and a bit months”.