Hitoshi Igarashi, Islamic scholar murdered over translating Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

Prosecutors can no longer indict the killer of Hitoshi Igarashi, but they will continue to investigate the case, which they suspect to be an act of religiously motivated international terrorism. The statute of limitations will be suspended if the culprit is found to have been outside the country during the past 15 years.

On July 12, 1991, Igarashi, 44, an assistant professor of Islamic studies at the University of Tsukuba, was found dead with stab wounds to his neck and face in a university building in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture.

Igarashi translated the novel in 1990, which was published in 1989 by Rushdie. Iran's Islamic revolutionary leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a "death sentence" to Rushdie over the novel in 1989, and an Italian translator was attacked and seriously injured several days before Igarashi was killed.

Some 34,000 police investigators have been mobilized for the case since 1991, but no clues have been found.

The Japan Times Weekly: July 15, 2006
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