Tokyo Cops Make Horrific Find in Man's Apartment

Tokyo police say they have arrested a man after finding "multiple" dismembered bodies in coolers in his apartment in a city southwest of the capital. A police spokesman said Tuesday the 27-year-old suspect confessed to cutting up the bodies and hiding them in cold-storage cases, covered with cat litter. The official said investigators found the bodies while searching for a 23-year-old woman who had disappeared, the AP reports. The national broadcaster NHK and other media said police believed the bodies of eight women and one man were hidden in the apartment. The missing woman is thought to be one of them.

Police also reportedly found a toolbox and a saw that they said may have been used to dismember the bodies. The Japan Times has identified the suspect as Takahiro Shiraishi, a resident of Zama in Kanagawa Prefecture. "It's true that I tried to hide the bodies of the people I killed to destroy evidence," police quoted Shiraishi as saying. According to the Times, Shiraishi met the missing 23-year-old woman after she visited a suicide-related website and said she wanted to die. Police say security cameras captured the woman and the suspect walking together at a train station near his home.

(More Japan stories.)