Schoolboy killing shocks Japan
TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) --A 12-year-old schoolboy has admitted killing a four-year-old boy by pushing him off the roof of a multi-storey car park, Japanese police say.
Police in Nagasaki, 980 kilometers (600 miles) south of Tokyo, are questioning the boy.
The naked, battered body of Shun Tanemoto was found at a car park in the city last week after he was taken from a store where his parents were shopping four kilometers away, media reports said.
"I want to tell Shun's mum and dad I am sorry. I regret this," police quoted the suspect as saying during questioning Wednesday.
The case, which has shocked the nation, has dominated local media. Observers say that despite recent lurid headlines, murder is very rare among Japanese youth.
According to news reports, the boy was identified by enhanced video images used by police from security cameras near the car park. It showed him, in school uniform of white shirt and black trousers, leading Shun by the hand.
Footprints on the car park roof also matched the style of sneakers recommended for students by several local middle schools, media said.
"I want to tell the culprit . . . you should spend your whole life atoning for this crime," the victim's father, Tsuyoshi Tanemoto, 30, told a news conference.
Under Japanese law, a juvenile under the age of 14 cannot face criminal prosecution. However media say that police have sent a report to the welfare office who will then decide if the case will go to a family court.
Japan cut the age at which children can face criminal prosecution to 14 from 16 after a schoolboy horrified the nation by murdering two children and leaving the severed head of one outside the gates of a school in the western city of Kobe in 1997.
The latest case comes in the wake of the suspected killing of a 13-year-old by a group of teens on the southern island of Okinawa at the end of June.
"It is because murders in general have become so unusual that cases involving people who seem to have personality disorders, such as the one in Kobe, stand out and give the impression that young people are weird," said Mariko Hasegawa, a behavioural scientist at Waseda University in Tokyo. |
