A tangled web of confessions

Police were called to Koto Memorial Hospital in Higashiomi, Japan, in May 2003. In the hours before dawn, a nurse had discovered a 72-year-old patient dead in his room in suspicious circumstances.

The patient, who was unnamed, had been in a vegetative state when his respiratory tube had somehow become unplugged.

Despite him being under round-the-clock care – and even though an alarm should have gone off – nobody seemed to notice.

Unable to breathe, the patient had died.

Suspecting professional negligence, police opened an investigation and, a year later,