TOKYO: The publisher of Japan’s leading newspaper apologized to readers Thursday for several serious errors in its reporting, retracting an article that claimed workers abandoned their posts during the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Asahi’s publisher Tadakazu Kimura, speaking at a hastily arranged news conference, made the apology after a confidential government document cited in the daily’s report was finally released to the public with no mention of a mutiny by plant workers.

“I offer profound apologies to our readers and people at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO),” the 60-year-old publisher said.

He said he would decide whether or not to resign after enacting “revival through sweeping reform.”

The article published on May 20 said 90 percent of workers at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant had left the complex, disobeying the plant chief’s order to stay put in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

TEPCO operates the plant, located 220 km northeast of Tokyo. A massive earthquake and tsunami crippled its cooling systems and sent reactors into meltdown in March 2011.

The daily said about 650 employees, or 90 percent of the plant’s workforce, retreated to another seaside TEPCO nuclear plant 12 km away when the nuclear crisis worsened a few days after the accident.

The official document released Thursday recounted the testimony of plant chief Masao Yoshida to a government investigative panel, with no trace of staff “disobeying Mr. Yoshida’s order” as Asahi had claimed. Yoshida died of cancer in July last year.

Other dailies which also had access to the then confidential statement had already cast doubt on the article.

In the same news conference, Kimura also admitted a highly contentious report published 32 years ago on the topic of Japan’s wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women was also false.