NINE BODIES FOUND IN TOKYO SUBURB, SUSPECT ARRESTED
Man admits to cutting off heads of 9 bodies, stripping their flesh and disposing remains in trash with cat litter
POLICE have found nine mutilated bodies dumped in containers with their heads cut off and flesh stripped in a suburban flat, media reported yesterday.
Tokyo police have arrested Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, who reportedly confessed to slicing the flesh off the bodies and throwing it in the trash, then sprinkling cat litter over the remains in an effort to cover up the evidence.
Shiraishi told police he had chopped up the bodies in a bathroom. A saw was found in his room. The suspect also told investigators he had “dumped cut flesh and organs in the trash”.
Police and journalists swarmed around the nondescript apartment in the quiet residential neighbourhood of Zama, as locals struggled to comprehend how an act of such violence could have occurred so near them.
“It’s really cruel. He used a saw to dismember the bodies or something. He must be abnormal to have done such things,” said neighbour Hideaki Hosogaya, 83.
The Sankei Shimbun newspaper quoted another neighbour as saying he had smelled an odour he had “never smelled before”.
“I thought it was the smell of sewage,” he said.
Police used blue tarps to block views inside the two-storey building, and covered windows of the second-floor room where the bodies were discovered.
Social media users were quick to draw parallels with Halloween.
One Twitter user wrote: “Nine dismembered bodies found on Halloween. Humans are definitely scarier than ghosts.”
Another said: “What a psychotic event on Halloween. I don’t think I could bear 10 minutes with nine dead bodies around.”
Authorities had been investigating the disappearance of a 23year-old woman and discovered a connection between her and Shiraishi. This woman had earlier tweeted “I’m looking for someone to die with me“, according to the Sankei Shimbun daily.
Other media said Shiraishi and the woman had connected via a website featuring information about suicides. A CCTV image showed Shiraishi and the woman walking together last Monday.
She had been missing since Sept 21 and her brother reported her disappearance to police, according to the Asahi Shimbun.
When police visited the apartment, they found two heads inside a cool box at the entrance before making the grisly discovery of the other body parts, according to Jiji Press.
“During the investigation, the heads of nine bodies have been discovered” inside coolers and containers in the apartment, private TV network TBS said.
Police are holding Shiraishi on a charge that he dismembered one body and placed it inside a cooler, which he was not contesting, according to a Tokyo Metropolitan Police spokesman. AFP