Police questioned the former chairman of Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corp. on suspicion the Japanese truck maker tried to shirk responsibility for a fatal accident in which a wheel flew off one of its trucks, national media reported on Sunday.

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According to Associated Press (AP), 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.


AP noted that 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 truck maker 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, according to Associated Press.


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

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AP said that authorities are investigating dozens of wheel-separation accidents involving Mitsubishi trucks dating back more than a decade and noted that, 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, AP said.


A spokesman for police in Kanagawa prefecture (state), Hiroyoshi Ichikawa, declined to comment to Associated Press on the media reports on Sunday.


AP said that DaimlerChrysler owns 43% of the truck maker, and Mitsubishi Motors 42% and noted that 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.