TOKYO - A JAPANESE businessman accused of plotting his wife's murder in Los Angeles in 1981 has killed himself after being extradited to the US city to face trial, the foreign ministry in Tokyo said on Saturday.

Kazuyoshi Miura, 61, committed suicide at 9.45 pm on Friday (12.45am on Saturday) and died later, a ministry official said, citing information obtained by the Japanese Consulate General from the Los Angeles Police Department.

Miura was thought to have been in police custody at the time.

'No other details, including how and where he committed suicide, are immediately available,' said the official at the ministry's division for protection of safety of Japanese abroad.

Miura arrived in Los Angeles earlier on Friday after being extradited from the US-administered Northern Mariana Islands.

He was arrested on the main island of Saipan in February while visiting as a tourist and gave up his legal fight against extradition late last month.

He had been due to appear in a Los Angeles court next week for arraignment on charges of conspiracy to commit murder.

Miura had been dubbed the 'Japanese O.J. Simpson' because of the intense interest in his case at home.

Miura was shot in the leg and his 28-year-old wife Kazumi received a bullet wound to the head in what appeared at the time to be a robbery in a Los Angeles car park on November 18, 1981.

The wife was returned to Japan by the US Air Force and died in hospital after a year in a coma. The case became notorious and reinforced Japanese perceptions of the US as a violent country.

But a series of Japanese news articles in 1984 started to change perceptions when a former mistress of Miura said he had asked her to kill his wife three months before the shooting.

Miura was convicted of attempted murder in 1987 for his part in the assault and a year later was charged for the Los Angeles killing by a Japanese court, although he was released after a successful appeal in 1998.

US judge Steven Van Sicklen ruled last month that Miura could only face conspiracy to commit murder charges in California - rather than a count of murder - because of double jeopardy rules. -- AFP