Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama said Friday he wanted to apologize frankly to people declared not guilty in a Kagoshima vote-buying case over any trouble caused by his earlier statement denying that they had been falsely accused.

"From the viewpoint of the people who were accused, I suppose it was natural for them to say 'the false accusations have been cleared up' when they were found not guilty," the minister said in a post Cabinet meeting news conference on Friday.

"If I have made any of the people who were accused feel uncomfortable through the comments I made at a meeting of prosecution chiefs, then I want to apologize frankly," he said.

At a House of Representatives Budget Committee meeting on Thursday, Hatoyama had been pursued over his statement that the charges against the former suspects in the case "shouldn't be called false charges," prompting him to effectively take back the comment.

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