Man held after remains of nine people found in Tokyo home

A JAPANESE man was arrested after the body parts of at least nine people were found hidden inside cool boxes in his home.

Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, was being questioned by police after they found numerous body parts, including severed heads, belonging to at least nine people at his flat in Zama, Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo.

“It’s true that I tried to hide the bodies of the people I killed to destroy evidence,” the suspect told police, according to Japanese media reports.

Tokyo Metropolitan Police officers had been investigating the disappearance of a 23-year-old woman who vanished in Hachioji, western Tokyo, earlier this month when the discoveries were made.

The woman was said to have met Shiraishi online after he responded to a message she posted on a suicide website stating that she wanted to kill herself. Her brother later discovered messages exchanged between the woman and Shiraishi on Twitter before reporting her disappearance to police.

CCTV footage captured the woman walking with Shiraishi at a station near her home in Hachioji and also close to his apartment in Zama, police said.

The suspect is believed to have moved into the two-level wooden building on a quiet residential street in Zama in late August, according to the Kyodo News Agency.

A neighbour who lives on the same floor as the suspect said he had not heard any unusual noises but had no- ticed an “odd smell” in August. “I thought it smelled like sewage,” he told Kyodo.

Police said they planned to charge Shiraishi and had reportedly started conducting DNA tests on the remains to help identify the victims.