Police Question Man In Japanese Killings
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Sunday, November 23, 2008
TOKYO, Nov. 23 -- A man with bloodstained knives in his possession turned himself in to police here Saturday night, saying that he had killed a former Japanese health minister.
That homicide was one of two stabbing attacks last week that police had suspected were linked to public anger over the loss of millions of pension records by bureaucrats in the Health and Welfare Ministry.
But the man, Takeshi Koizumi, 46, said he killed the former minister because he was angry about the death of his pet in a health-care center, according to police.
The bodies of retired vice minister Takehiko Yamaguchi, 66, and his wife, Michiko, 61, were found Tuesday morning in their home in a Tokyo suburb. They had been stabbed several times with a long knife. Takehiko Yamaguchi was head of the Health Ministry's pension division when the national pension system underwent a major record-keeping overhaul in 1985.
In the small rental car that Koizumi drove Saturday night to a Tokyo police station, there were at least eight survival knives, two of which had blood on them, police said. There also were bloodstained gloves and bloodstained sneakers whose sole pattern matched a print left at the crime scene, according to a report by NHK, the national broadcaster.
Police questioned Koizumi in connection with the two stabbing deaths as well as another stabbing in the past week, on the wife of a former vice minister whose tenure as head of the Social Insurance Agency in the mid-1980s coincided with the botched computerization of the pension records. The wife survived the attack.
According to statements by police officials, Koizumi told authorities that his motive for the attack had nothing to do with the pension records.
"I was angry because the public health center once killed my pet," he was reported as saying.
The police have been investigating both stabbing incidents as possible serial terrorist attacks against former health ministry bureaucrats.
Since the attacks, the government has dispatched police across Japan to protect current and former senior bureaucrats who worked in the pension program.
