The victim, 29-year-old nurse Rika Okada
Japanese authorities have started a murder investigation after making the gruesome discovery that a box labelled ‘doll’ actually contained the body of a missing woman. The suspect, a primary school friend of the victim, was detained in Shanghai after she entered China with the dead woman’s passport. Here are the grisly details. SCMP reports:
The box had been sent from Osaka in western Japan to Hachioji, a city in greater Tokyo, where it was discovered in a storage locker. Despite its contents, the two-metre-long box had made the 370-kilometre journey between the two cities without prompting suspicion among postal workers. Media reports said the “doll” was in fact the body of Rika Okada, a 29-year-old nurse from Osaka who had been missing since late March.
More than a dozen stab wounds were found on Okada’s body, police said, adding that she did not appear to have put up a struggle.
A day after the report, Japanese media said a primary school friend of Okada had been detained in Shanghai after entering China using the dead woman’s passport. The Yomiuri and other newspapers said a 29-year-old woman had appeared at the Japanese consulate in the city before being turned over to Chinese authorities on suspicion of entering the country using false documents. The Osaka prefectural police are to ask Chinese authorities to release the woman into their custody, newspaper reports said.
The school friend, who has not been named, lived a few hundred metres from the locker where Okada’s body was found. She had flown to Shanghai from Haneda airport in Tokyo with an unnamed Chinese woman earlier this month. Police are trying to determine what happened to Okada between being reported missing and the discovery of her body. Just before she went missing she had written on her Facebook page that she was going to meet an old friend whom she had not seen for 10 years.
[Main pic via inside.com]
