AICHI (TR) – Aichi Prefectural Police on Sunday arrested a 20-year-old woman after the discovery of the corpse of a fetus inside a suitcase left at a building in Nagoya, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Apr. 12).
According to the Naka Police Station, Haruka Kaneko, a bar employee, said that she became pregnant last year. “I underwent an abortion in December,” she said. “[Until I abandoned the body], I kept it at my residence.”
That residence was also occupied by her former boyfriend, 22, also a bar employee. He is believed to have been the father.
The results of an autopsy revealed that the fetal age was around 5 months. The cause of death and gender are not known, police said.
At around 10:15 p.m. on Saturday, an employee at a bar working near the building, located in the Sakae area of Naka Ward, notified police of a “foul smell” coming from the suitcase.
Officers arriving at the scene found the suitcase — standing 50 centimeters tall and 30 centimeters wide — in a corridor near the entrance of a host club.
The partially skeletal remains were packed inside a paper bag placed inside a cardboard box. The gender of the newborn is not known, police said previously.
Kaneko is believed to have abandoned the suitcase around April 11.
