TOKYO -- Police on May 21 announced the arrest of a 39-year-old man who allegedly tried to take a university entrance exam for a teenage applicant.

According to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)'s Setagaya Police Station, cram school instructor Li Bin, a Chinese national and resident of Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, was arrested on suspicion of trespassing and forging a private document bearing a seal. He allegedly attempted to impersonate a teenage applicant during Nihon University's general entrance examination but ran into the real test-taker at the venue, and university staff noticed it.

Police said Li had been approached via the WeChat messaging app by someone who offered to pay him for taking the exam. He entered the test site equipped with a concealed miniature camera and microphone. Li sat at the seat marked on the admission ticket he had received in advance, but the teenage male examinee soon appeared. Both carried admission tickets and residence cards bearing the same name, prompting university officials to call police.

Li is specifically accused of entering the Nihon University testing site in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward on March 4 and writing the teenager's name on an answer sheet that had already been distributed. The suspect has reportedly admitted to investigators he did so "to cheat on the exam."

(Japanese original by Yuka Asahina, Tokyo City News Department)