Police in Tokyo have arrested four company workers on suspicion of killing a 56-year-old colleague by manipulating him to stand on train tracks and be hit by a train, with the intention of making it look like a suicide.

The incident occurred at around 12:10 a.m. on December 3, 2023, at a crossing between Tobu-Nerima and Shimo-Akatsuka stations on the Tobu Tojo line in Itabashi Ward, NTV reported. The four suspects, one of whom is the company president, were arrested on Sunday.

The suspects are Manabu Sasaki, 39, the president of the paint company MA Kenso, and three employees, Akihito Shimabata, 34, Shunta Nozaki, 39, and Atsuya Iwade, 30.

According to police, the four visited the victim, Osamu Takano, at his apartment at around 10 p.m. on Dec 2, 2023. They all left by car. At some point, Sasaki and Iwade left the group.

The car with Shimabata, Nozaki and Takano stopped on a bridge over the Arakawa River on the border between Itabashi Ward and Saitama Prefecture. Nozaki's smartphone recorded audio suggested that they talked about forcing Takano to jump into the river on the bridge, but when he resisted, they headed to the railroad crossing.

When police received the first report of the incident, they initially investigated the possibility of suicide, as security camera footage showed Takano getting out the car and wandering onto the tracks where he was hit by an oncoming train. There is no barrier at the crossing.

Police said a video has also been found that shows Sasaki and others assaulting Takano at various times prior to his death. They believe Takano was subjected to bullying regularly at his company where he worked for 10 years.

Police said that messages on the four suspects' cell phones and the Line messaging app show that Takano was mentally and physically bullied for the last three years and that apparently he had reached breaking point.

Even though Takano seemed to willingly walk onto the train tracks by himself and was not pushed, police believe his act was the result of years of abuse at the hands of his colleagues, and thus his death could be classified as a murder.