TOKYO: Kabuki actor Ichikawa Ennosuke IV, who has been indicted for aiding his parents to commit suicide, was released on a 5-million-yen bail Monday.

He was set free after Tokyo District Court dismissed public prosecutors’ complaint against the court’s decision to grant bail the same day and the money was paid.

At a parking lot for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Harajuku Station in the capital’s Shibuya Ward, the 47-year-old actor, whose real name is Takahiko Kinoshi, deeply bowed in front of the press corps and then got in a car.

Ennosuke’s counsel requested the bail on Friday, when he was indicted on the charges of helping his parents kill themselves by giving them large doses of ground-up psychotropic pills dissolved in water at their house on May 17. His father was kabuki actor Ichikawa Danshiro IV.

According to investigative sources, Ennosuke and his parents decided to go to “the next world” after they learned that a weekly magazine article about his harassment scandal was to be published that day. Ennosuke is also believed to have taken sleeping pills in a suicide attempt.

JIJI Press