TOKYO - After nine months of faltering investigations, Japanese police have charged an accused serial rapist with the kidnapping and killing of Lucie Blackman, the British woman whose mutilated body was dug up earlier this year from a beachside cave near Tokyo.
Charges of kidnap, assault resulting in death, and mutilation
and abandonment of a body, were formally brought yesterday against Joji Obara, a 48-year-old property developer, who is already being tried for the rape of five other women and the killing of one.
They bring to an end one of Japan's most protracted, baffling and high-profile missing person cases, which drew in prime ministers, psychics and the police in Japan and Britain.
"The suspect, in July 2000, invited Lucie Jane Blackman, a 21-year-old Englishwoman, to lunch, and took her to a condominium in Zushi city in Kanagawa prefecture," said Superintendent Tadao Sugawara of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police at a press conference in Tokyo yesterday.
"He plied her with drinks laced with drugs, which caused her to lose control of her faculties, and he assaulted her. As a result, she died of drug intoxication. The suspect mutilated her body and left it in Miura, Kanagawa prefecture. He was informed of the charges, but he is maintaining his silence."
Mr Obara was arrested last October and, in February, Ms Blackman's body, cut into eight pieces, was dug up from a coastal cave 200 yards from a seaside apartment owned by the suspect in Miura, 45 miles from Tokyo.
Despite this, and six months of intensive questioning, he has denied any part in these crimes.
Most of his alleged victims, including Ms Blackman, were foreign women working as bar hostesses in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Ms Blackman's funeral was held near her mother's home in Kent last week.
- INDEPENDENT
