Three high school girls, including a 15-year-old, were among the nine people mutilated by a suspected serial killer in Japan, reports said Monday, as one woman described how she had a lucky escape.
At least three of the victims were high school pupils from different regions and one of them was a 15-year-old girl who went missing in late August, several media quoted police sources as saying.
Not all of the victims have been identified but some were tracked down via bank cards and other items left in the apartment room of Takahiro Shiraishi, where the Japanese man allegedly murdered and hacked up nine young people.
Some cellphones also lost contact near the apartment, reports said.
On the morning of Halloween, police uncovered a grisly house of horrors behind Shiraishi’s front door: nine dismembered bodies with as many as 240 bone parts stashed in coolers and tool boxes, sprinkled with cat litter in a bid to hide the evidence.
He moved into the one-room apartment in Zama, a southwestern suburb of Tokyo, on August 22.
He is suspected of having lured people with suicidal tendencies via Twitter by telling them he could help them in their plans or even die alongside them.
He reportedly went ahead with killing people even after realising what they had wanted was just to talk rather than to die.
“I had no intention of killing myself at all. None (of the victims) wanted to die actually,” the private Fuji television network quoted Shiraishi as telling investigators.
He allegedly hanged victims after giving them alcohol or sleeping pills or strangling them until they fainted.
He may have continued to kill if not arrested. A woman in her 20s claims to have arranged a meeting with Shiraishi for the day after he was eventually arrested after discussing suicide via email and phone for two months.
He refused to talk when she said she could hear a woman groaning in the background during a telephone conversation on one October night.
“He had given me two options. One was that he makes me unconscious by putting sleep drug in my drink and then strangles me with a rope. The other was that he strangles me with a rope from behind while I’m watching TV or something,” she told the Fuji network.
“If I had met with him, I may have been dismembered like other victims. I may be lucky but I’m rather scared now.”
Sacked Catalan leader freed on bail in Belgium
AFP
Catalonia’s sacked separatist leader Carles Puigdemont and four of his former ministers were released with conditions in Belgium on Sunday after turning themselves in to face a Spanish warrant for their arrest.
A judge ordered the five, who fled Spain earlier this week after being accused of rebellion and sedition, not to leave Belgium until their extradition case is heard.
It is the latest twist in the crisis unleashed by the Catalan separatists’ push to break away from Spain, sending shock waves across Europe.
Puigdemont and his allies escaped to Belgium last Monday after Spain dismissed the Catalan executive and imposed direct rule on the semi-autonomous region following the declaration of independence by the parliament there last month.
“They were taken into custody at 9:17 am (0817 GMT),” said Gilles Dejemeppe, a spokesman for Belgian prosecutors.
A white van believed to be carrying Puigdemont raced out of the Belgian prosecutor’s office around 15 hours later, AFP reporters witnessed.
“The request made this afternoon by the Brussels’ Prosecutor’s Office for the provisional release of all persons sought has been granted by the investigative judge,” said the statement by the prosecutor’s office shortly afterwards.
The next court hearing will be in the following 15 days. Belgium has up to 60 days to decide whether to send the Catalans back to Spain.
Puigdemont’s PDeCAT party said Sunday that he had turned himself in to show his “willingness not to flee from the judicial process but to defend himself in a fair and impartial process, which is possible in Belgium, and highly doubtful in Spain”.
Puigdemont wrote on Twitter on Saturday that he and his colleagues-Meritxell Serret, Antoni Comin, Lluis Puig and Clara Ponsati-would cooperate with the Belgian authorities.
Spain issued European arrest warrants on Friday after Puigdemont and his allies ignored a summons to appear before a judge on allegations linked to the move to declare Catalonia an independent republic.
The judge in Madrid had on Thursday put Puigdemont’s deputy and seven other deposed regional ministers behind bars because of a risk they would flee.
Puigdemont, 54, insists that Catalonia earned the right to declare independence following a banned referendum last month and has described his detained colleagues as “political prisoners”.
On Sunday, protesters in Catalan cities took to the streets to demand their release.
In Barcelona, city police said about 350 people gathered on the central University Square, shouting “Freedom” and carrying posters that read “Freedom for political prisoners”.
Others stuck posters demanding their release on walls throughout the city.
Puigdemont said he was not convinced by guarantees of a fair trial back home, denouncing the “enormous pressure and political influence on judicial power in Spain.”
The judge could “refuse to hand over Puigdemont if there is a proven serious risk to his fundamental rights,” said Anne Weyembergh, president of the Institute of European Studies at the Free University of Brussels.
