JAPAN. HUSBAND DEFENDS JAPAN'S 'CURRY KILLER'

Kenji Hayashi, a Japanese man whose wife was sentenced to death for killing four neighbors with arsenic-laced curry -- and once allegedly tried to poison him -- said she should be freed and reunited with their four children.
Former insect exterminator Kenji, 60, said the arsenic in the house was his and defended his wife Masumi, who was set to hear an appeal-court ruling in three weeks.
"I'm filled with the wish that she will win the trial and return to her children as soon as possible," Kenji Hayashi told a nationally televised news conference in Osaka.
The husband made the remark hours after his own release from jail where he served six years for defrauding insurance firms out of 162.8 million yen (1.5 million dollars) with accidents the couple claimed to have suffered.
Masumi Hayashi, 43, was sentenced to hang for murder and other charges in December 2002 by the Wakayama District Court in western Japan.
Two children and two adults died in agony hours after eating curry rice and 63 others fell ill at a community festival in July 1998 in the bizarre case that gripped the nation and led to a rash of copycat poisonings.
Throughout lower-court hearings, prosecutors were unable to present direct evidence linking her to the curry murders -- the motives of which remain a mystery -- but relied on circumstantial evidence.
The district court also found Masumi Hayashi guilty of three counts of attempted murder, including by giving her husband arsenic-laced food in February 1997.
But Kenji Hayashi had testified that he took the arsenic himself.
He admitted it was "fully possible" that the Osaka High Court would uphold the death penalty for his wife on June 28.