TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have applied fresh charges of murder to 25-year-old woman previously accused of abandoning the corpse of her infant in a coin-operated locker in Shinjuku Ward, reports NHK (June 12).
On May 29, a an employee tasked with fee collection 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 revealed that pressure had been applied to the neck of the infant, leading police to suspect that she was murdered.
Mao Togawa has admitted to strangling the child to death with a towel, according to police.
On June 2, police first arrested Togawa on suspicion of abandoning a corpse. During questioning, she admitted to killing the child after giving birth in a room of a manga coffee shop.
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 was previously quoted by police.
