A British man living in the outskirts of Tokyo with the teenage Japanese wife he met over the internet, was arrested last night on suspicion of shaking their 12-day-old baby son to death.

The alleged incident is thought to have taken place in mid-June, shortly after the baby was brought back to their home from the maternity hospital. The baby’s 19-year old mother returned to work just a few days after giving birth, leaving the newborn with his father.

Supposedly cracking under the stress of the baby’s crying, and struggling with his only very basic knowledge of Japanese, the 20-year old man is thought to have violently shaken the newborn baby and dashed his head against a table.

According to the police, the man’s wife returned from work and found the baby limp and took her son to the nearest hospital: the boy died a day later from a subdural hemorrhage now thought to have been caused by the shaking.

Police in the Ome district of the capital identified the man as Anthony Buckley and told reporters that he had now admitted to the allegations. When the incident was first investigated, Mr Buckley told police that the baby had slipped through his hands while he was being bathed, apparently satisfying investigators that it had been an accident.

Mr Buckley is understood to have arrived in Japan in July 2007 after a long-distance courtship via email. The couple married, but it remains unclear whether Mr Buckley has ever worked in Japan.

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