A former senior Foreign Ministry official testified March 19 in the Diet that key documents related to the secret nuclear pacts between Japan and the United States that he had filed were missing, and suggested they were deliberately destroyed.

Kazuhiko Togo, a former Foreign Ministry Treaties Bureau chief, was called to give unsworn testimony before the Diet.

While Togo was head of the bureau between 1998 and 1999, he said he had filed 58 documents and specially marked 16 as important. But out of the 16, half were not found, including a record of a meeting between Japanese and U.S. officials during which the United States explained its policy of not confirming the whereabouts of its nuclear arms.