12:00 PM
MIURA, JAPAN - The hunt for Lucie Blackman, the British bar hostess whose disappearance has baffled Japan for seven months, seemed to have ended yesterday, when the dismembered and decomposed body of a woman was recovered from a seaside cave, 45 miles from Tokyo.
After a four-day search along a cliff in the town of Miura, police, wearing surgical masks, carried a long bundle wrapped in plastic sheeting past reporters and into a police van. The bundle was taken to Tokyo for analysis. It contained the body of a foreign woman, cut into eight pieces, some of them partially embedded in cement, according to police.
Pathologists were comparing the remains with dental records last night, and no formal identification was announced. But there seems to be little doubt that the body is that of 21-year-old Ms Blackman (who would now be 22), who disappeared last summer after going to meet a male customer from the bar where she worked.
Ms Blackman's father, Tim Blackman, last night said he was "shattered" by the possibility that the remains could be those of his daughter.
He said: "I held a hope in my heart ... that perhaps I would be asked to go to Tokyo and at best bring Lucie home alive, at worst to identify her body ... It would seem the remains ... are skeletal and the need for identification does not exist."
The cave where the body was found is 200 yards from an apartment owned by the only suspect in the case – Joji Ohara, a Japanese businessman arrested last October and charged with five rapes and one count of accidental killing, all of them of bar hostesses working, like Ms Blackman, in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Police first found feet, a hand and a section of leg and later discovered what was believed to be a head encased in concrete.
Mr Blackman said: "I think the only belief I can really hold on to ... is that if indeed this is Lucie and if indeed she lost her life in this way, it is highly likely she knew very little about it".
Japanese police believe body found is Lucie Blackman
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