Boy Beheads Mother, takes severed head to Japan police
Pastor Dale Morgan
Tuesday May 15, 11:28 AM Reuters
*
Boy Beheads Mother, takes severed head to Japan police*
TOKYO (Reuters) - A 17-year-old boy turned up at a police station in
rural Japan on Tuesday holding a severed human head and claiming that he
had killed his mother, police said.
Police in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima prefecture, 200 km (125 miles) north
of Tokyo, said they had begun a murder investigation but declined to say
if they had arrested the teenager.
Kyodo news agency said police had found a beheaded body in the apartment
where the boy lived.
The teenager, a student at a local high school, showed up at the police
station alone early on Tuesday, carrying the head in a shopping bag,
Kyodo added.
"If it's true, then it is horrendous," the government's top spokesman,
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, told reporters.
In 1997, the nation was shocked when a 14-year-old schoolboy was
arrested for the murder and beheading of an 11-year-old boy and leaving
the boy's head next to a school gate in the western city of Kobe.
While government statistics show that overall juvenile crime and murder
by minors -- those under 20 -- have been on a decline in recent years, a
number of sensational crimes has led to calls for harsher punishment
against young offenders.
Following the Kobe murder, the age at which youths could be sent to
reformatories was lowered to 14 from 16 in 2001, and a bill to further
bring the age down to 12 passed the lower house of parliament last month.
In 2004, an 11-year-old school girl killed a classmate by stabbing her
in the neck with a cutter knife, and the year before, a 12-year-old boy
murdered a four-year-old by pushing him off the roof of a garage.