Tokyo,18 Sept - The president of a Japanese company that bought tainted rice and sold it for food committed suicide, police said on Wednesday, the latest development in a national food scandal.
The firm in Nara, 380 km (240 miles) west of Tokyo, was one of 370 companies that had purchased contaminated rice meant for industrial purposes from Mikasa Foods, a small rice processing company in Osaka, a farm ministry report showed.
"This is very regretful and we pray for him," government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura told a group of reporters.
"While there had been discussions within the government on whether to publicise, in the end we thought it is the government's duty to disclose all information from the viewpoint of securing safety."
The scandal, in which three small companies including Mikasa Foods put tainted rice into the food chain, comes as lawmakers gear up for a possible lower house election, which media have said could take place in November.
Japanese consumers have lost trust in the food industry in recent years from repeated lapses in quality and false labelling of a variety of food, varying from sweets to meat.
The farm ministry cancelled the planned purchase of 25,000 tonnes of foreign rice under the simulatenous buy and sell system, which was originally planned for Wednesday. It said it had decided to suspend rice tenders for a while.