What began as a case of a missing person led Japanese police yesterday to the arrest of a 27-year-old man after the gruesome discovery of nine dismembered bodies and their severed heads in his apartment..
What began as a case of a missing person led Japanese police yesterday to the arrest of a 27-year-old man after the gruesome discovery of nine dismembered bodies and their severed heads in his apartment.
Takahiro Shiraishi has confessed to murdering eight women and one man, and the police are treating him as a serial killer. The body parts were found in Shiraishi’s two-storey apartment in Zama city in Kanagawa prefecture, to the south-west of Tokyo.
Local media quoted him as having told the police that he cut up his victims and «disposed of their flesh and internal organs like trash», while keeping their heads and bones, including arms and legs.
The police had been investigating the disappearance of a 23-year-old woman from Tokyo’s Hachioji suburb, whose brother lodged a report last Tuesday after she went offline.
The woman, who had been seeking help for a mental disorder, had posted on Twitter that she wanted to commit suicide but was afraid of dying alone and was seeking a companion to do so.
That tweet was her first point of contact with Shiraishi, who the police believe used social media to lure victims who had publicly expressed their intention to kill themselves.
