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Japanese Postman Hid Up to 24,000 Undelivered Item

A postman of Japan Post rides a motorcycle in Tokyo. Issei Kato/Reuters
A postman of Japan Post rides a motorcycle in Tokyo. Issei Kato/Reuters
    Tokyo, London - Asharq Al-Awsat
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Japanese Postman Hid Up to 24,000 Undelivered Item

A postman of Japan Post rides a motorcycle in Tokyo. Issei Kato/Reuters
A postman of Japan Post rides a motorcycle in Tokyo. Issei Kato/Reuters

A postman admitted he stockpiled 24,000 letters for years in his house because he thinks his job is too hard.

The 61-year-old man told the Japanese police "it was too much bother to deliver the items."

The authorities found thousands of undelivered letters in his house in the Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo.

The man kept the letters for years, but his action wasn't discovered until lately following an internal investigation carried out by the post company.

Efforts are being made to deliver all the delayed mails accompanied by an apology to each person who had to wait all this time to receive his letter or parcel.

In a similar case, a 47-year-old Argentinian postman, named Manuel Guterres, served a one year jail sentence in Patagonia after he was convicted of deliberately keeping letters.

In Guterres's house, the investigators found bags containing 19,000 undelivered letters with stamps, AFP reported.

The case took place in 2009, but, the final sentence wasn't announced until 2015, stipulating a suspended year of prison, after being convicted of "illegally keeping messages".

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Beloved Zurich Zoo Gorilla Euthanized after Years of Declining Health

FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)
FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)
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Beloved Zurich Zoo Gorilla Euthanized after Years of Declining Health

FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)
FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)

The Zurich Zoo’s beloved gorilla of more than 40 years has been put down after a long struggle with declining health, a zoo official in the Swiss city said this week.
N’Gola was 47 and one of the oldest male gorillas in European zoos, said Zurich Zoo director Severin Dressen.
He was a Western lowland gorilla — a subspecies of the great apes found in Africa and listed as critically endangered — and because of his mature age he was a silverback, after the gray hair on his back, The Associated Press reported.
N'Gola had suffered a host of health ailments, including arthritis, a heart condition and a tapeworm infection. He had been on painkillers for several years, eating less, and losing weight and muscle mass.
“It’s a hard decision to euthanize a silverback,” Dressen said.
"We’ve seen a crash in the wild over the span of three generations of 80% of the population," Dressen said about the decline of gorillas in the wild. Zoos can be helpful for research and public education about species protection, he added.
N'Gola was born in captivity and fathered 34 children. He was known for his sensitive side, taking “care of his harem, his group of females,” Dressen said.
In 2012, the female Nache in his harem suffered a burst appendix during advanced pregnancy, and both she and the unborn baby gorilla died, according to the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuricher Zeitung.
N’Gola spent weeks whimpering through the zoo enclosure looking for her, the report said.
Dressen also recalled a time when N'Gola looked after a baby gorilla in the group. "The mother wasn’t there, and he kind of — which is not a typical silverback behavior — took care of that baby.”
As for humans, N'Gola mostly ignored "other bipedal species on the other side of the glass” of his enclosure, Dressen said.