Japan teen suspected of beheading mom
17-year-old turned up at station carrying severed human head in a bag
Reuters
Updated: 5:05 a.m. ET May 15, 2007
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TOKYO - Japanese police arrested a 17-year-old boy on Tuesday on suspicion of murdering his mother after he turned up at a police station carrying a severed human head in a bag.
Police in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima prefecture, 125 miles north of Tokyo, said they arrested the teenager, a student at a local high school, after officers found a beheaded body in the apartment where he lived.
The boy told police he killed his mother on Monday evening while she was asleep, Kyodo news agency said.
???If it???s true, then it is horrendous,??? the government???s top spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, told reporters.
The boy had not been attending school recently and was being treated by a psychiatrist, Kyodo said, adding that he had told investigators: ???It would be good if terrorism and war were gone from this world. I didn???t care who I killed.???
Kyodo said Tuesday was the mother???s birthday and she would have turned 47.
The boy was living with his younger brother in the apartment, away from their family home, so they could attend schools in the area, and the mother would often visit at weekends and wash their clothes, Kyodo said quoting neighbors.
In 1997, the nation was shocked when a 14-year-old schoolboy was arrested for the murder and beheading of an 11-year-old boy and leaving the boy???s head next to a school gate in the western city of Kobe.
While government statistics show that overall juvenile crime and murder by minors -- those under 20 -- have declined in recent years, a number of sensational crimes has led to calls for harsher punishment of young offenders.
Following the Kobe murder, the age at which youths could be sent to reformatories was lowered to 14 from 16 in 2001, and a bill to further bring the age down to 12 was passed by the lower house of parliament last month.
In 2004, an 11-year-old schoolgirl killed a classmate by stabbing her in the neck with a cutter knife, and the year before a 12-year-old boy murdered a four-year-old by pushing him off the roof of a garage.
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