Police said Saturday that a 22-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly stabbing a 21-year-old woman at her apartment in Kanagawa Prefecture.
The man, who has been named as Haruki Suzuki, was wanted by police over an incident in which he allegedly slashed a female acquaintance at her apartment in Ebina at around 9:15 a.m. on Friday, TBS reported. The woman sustained serious injuries in the attack, following which Suzuki, a resident of Tokyo's Arakawa Ward, fled the scene.
According to police, Suzuki was arrested after being spotted on a train in Aomori Prefecture at around 4 p.m.
Police quoted Suzuki as saying, "I slashed her with a knife. I wanted to cause her pain."
© Japan Today
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oikawa
Who on earth "spotted" a guy from Arakawa-ku on a train in Aomori and how did the information get up there so quickly??
smithinjapan
oikawa: Obviously there's a lot of details that have been left out of the reports on here but were likely in the J-media. The police probably knew who they were looking for and alerted station staff to be on the lookout. Then again, who knows?
In any case, I knew he would be caught, and I'm glad it was before he could do it again. These sickos are becoming far too rampant in Japan.
oikawa
smith, I looked at some Japanese sites and it said they saw him on cameras at Ueno getting on an Aomori Shinkansen, but I don't know why they would have thought to check the Ueno station cameras for a case in Kanagawa, and even then had to have been incredibly lucky to spot one person so quickly out of hundreds of thousands, and then to get a good photo from someone and circulate it around Aomori quickly enough that someone would actually be observant enough to spot and recognize someone involved in a case hundreds of miles away, although there's probably not much else to do in Aomori except solve other people's crimes. It's just amazing to me that they solved this quickly something I thought was the lifetime work of the average J-policeman.
bonword
I have no idea if they are using facial recognition software but JT readers may recall the article posted a while back about Hitachi kokusai electric's system that could compare a single face to 36 million others per second.
But perhaps they just focus on the shinkansen and airports at first as a method to close the net on the suspect?
Morry
Haruki Suzuki .. what a name.
In most countries, suspects' names are not disclosed until a conviction has been achieved.
billyshears
I would guess that his hometown was in Aomori and the police ascertained where his family lived and therefore what train line would be used. It's nearly always the same problem when Japan Today try to write their own articles instead of using the news agencies...not enough information.
BurakuminDes
By the sounds of things, this guy sounds a real psychotic nutjob. Short of execution, I hope he never sees sunlight again. Let's hope and pray the poor innocent lady survives.
oikawa
Educator60
Lol! Sorry I didn't state it explicitly but I was referring to the Aomori police, not regular people. It's amazing how touchy some people are over flippant comments. You really believe I'd think people in Aomori sit around in zombified stupors all day? hahaha..
calr751
the moment you get this kind of idea, just walk away. you win.
Mike Critchley
Say what you might about the Keystones -- arresting a guy who had gotten that far away from the scene is impressive. Well done, guys!
LH10
ex lover? or stalker maybe...or envy of her hmmm
ebisen
Face recognition software, coupled with high quality surveillance cameras might have just done this trick. A good job indeed.
viking68
It would make sense if all the cameras were wired up to facial recognition software. It seems like it would be very difficult otherwise to pick someone out of a crowd.
Other countries are using it, so the lack of mention in Japan makes me think it is in use, as it should be.
Hope the ex-"acquaintance" recovers.
Still, the whole admission by perps is too strange for me. The only time perps admit to a crime is in a cheesy movie or in Japan. As an possible thing the perp said: "I did slashed her to cause her pain. And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for the victim knowing exactly who I was and those pesky surveillance cameras." I mean he could have just ran straight to the police station to confess and saved everyone a lot of time.
Dennis Bauer
@Educator60 Ok, Nihonkai stopped? That was a nice cheap service to travel north, i know the shinkansen is fast but not quite cheap.