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Three former leaders of the Tepco company were acquitted this Thursday by a Tokyo court, which judged that they could not be held guilty of the consequences of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima in 2011 after a huge tusnami.

These three former officials of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant operator, devastated by the tsunami of March 11, 2011, are the only natural persons judged by that incident , the second worst nuclear accident in history, behind Chernobyl (Ukraine ), in 1986.

They were accused of negligence that caused death because they had not taken into account the information that warned about the risk of a tsunami that exceeds the resistance capabilities of the plant.

For the president of the board of directors of Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) at the time of the drama, Tsunehisa Katsumata (79 years old), and former vice presidents Sakae Muto (69 years old) and Ichiro Takekuro (73 years old), five years of prison.

Specifically, they were tried for the death of 44 patients from the Futaba hospital , located a few kilometers from the central, during their emergency evacuation in extreme conditions. The situation proved deadly for these elderly patients.

Prosecutors had twice refused to initiate legal proceedings against Tepco leaders, arguing that there were not enough elements to do so . But in a second examination of the case conducted in 2015 by a panel of citizens (a procedure rarely used in Japan), a criminal proceeding was chosen.

"Japan's legal system failed again to defend the rights of tens of thousands of citizens affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011," the Greenpeace environmental organization said immediately in a statement.

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