Police investigate Japanese truckmaker Mitsubishi Fuso for alleged covering up accident

TOKYO April 25, 2004; The AP reported that police questioned the former chairman of Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corp. on suspicion the Japanese truckmaker tried to shirk responsibility for a fatal accident in which a wheel flew off one of its trucks, national media reported Sunday.

The reports said police were building a criminal case against Takashi Usami and other unnamed executives at Mitsubishi Fuso, an affiliate of Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and its German-American partner DaimlerChrysler AG, for allegedly filing a false report on the January 2002 accident.

A 29-year-old woman was killed and her two children injured on a sidewalk in the Tokyo suburb of Yokohama when they were struck by a wheel that came off a passing Mitsubishi truck. A hub linking the wheel to the axle was found to be broken.

The truckmaker blamed poor maintenance and overloading by the operator in a report it filed with industry regulators before conducting stress tests and other efforts in an internal probe, Kyodo News quoted police as saying.

Police have started questioning Usami, 63, on suspicion the truckmaker falsified the report to head off a recall, the media reports said.

Authorities are investigating dozens of wheel-separation accidents involving Mitsubishi trucks dating back more than a decade.

More than two years after the fatal accident, Mitsubishi Fuso announced in March plans to recall 220,000 trucks after acknowledging that a design flaw could cause the wheel hubs to crack.

Usami resigned earlier this month in a show of contrition over the delayed recall.

A spokesman for police in Kanagawa prefecture, Hiroyoshi Ichikawa, declined to comment on the media reports Sunday. Phones rang unanswered at Mitsubishi Fuso.

DaimlerChrysler owns 43 percent of the truckmaker, and Mitsubishi Motors 42 percent.

The relationship between those two partners was thrown into doubt last week when DaimlerChrysler announced it would not pump any more money in Mitsubishi Motors, which had reportedly planned to raise several billion dollars worth of capital from shareholders to restructure its struggling business. DaimlerChrysler holds a 37 percent stake in Mitsubishi Motors.