TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested a 25-year-old woman in connection with an infant’s corpse that was found last week in a coin-operated locker in Shinjuku Ward, reports the Sankei Shimbun (June 2).
On May 29, a fee-collection employee found the body of the girl inside one of the lockers in a series in the Kabukicho red-light district, located about 500 meters from JR Shinjuku Station.
The results of an autopsy, announced two days later, revealed that pressure had been applied to the neck of the infant, leading police to suspect that she was murdered.
On June 2, police arrested Mao Togawa on suspicion of abandoning a corpse. During questioning by the Shinjuku Police Station, she admitted to killing the child after giving birth in a room of a manga coffee shop.
According to police, the unclothed body of the infant was inside a series of plastic bags that had been placed in a suitcase. The body, with umbilical cord still attached, measured 47 centimeters long and weighed 1.79 kilograms. A towel was around its neck.
Togawa said that she killed the child when it cried out. “I abandoned the body [in the locker] several days later,” the suspect said.
An examination of security camera footage showed Togawa repeatedly inserting coins into the locker between May 8 and the morning of the 15th. She has been living in such coffee shops for roughly the past year, police said.
Police are now investigating whether to apply murder charges to the suspect.
