25 April,2009 01:21 PM IST | | Agencies
The Hiroshima District Court ordered a rightist group member Friday to pay about 2.2 million yen in compensation to the municipal government of the western Japan city for damaging a monument for a atomic bomb victims at the Peace Memorial Park in 2005.
According to the ruling, the 31-year-old man scraped off parts of the phrase in the monument's inscription praying for atomic bombing victims to rest in peace and pledging not to repeat the mistake, with a hammer and a chisel in July 2005.
Last year, he finished serving his sentence of two years and eight months in prison for vandalizing public property, which was handed down by the Hiroshima district court in October 2005.
The Hiroshima city government then asked him to pay the cost of repairing the cenotaph but eventually filed the lawsuit after he refused.
