A 36-year-old Filipino man arrested last year admitted Tuesday to raping and murdering a female university student in eastern Japan in January 2004.
During his first court hearing, Lampano Jerico Mori admitted his crimes against the 21-year-old woman, then a second-year Ibaraki University student, but the defense team expressed an intention to contest part of his charges such as the number of knife stabs he committed.
According to the indictment, Mori conspired with two juveniles and snatched the woman into a car on a street near the town of Ami, Ibaraki Prefecture, before sexually assaulting and choking her in the early hours of Jan 31, 2004. They then killed her by stabbing her multiple times with a knife at a riverbank in the neighboring village of Miho.
Last September, police arrested Mori, who was working at a factory in Gifu Prefecture in central Japan. They have placed his two Filipino accomplices, now aged 34 and 32 but who were minors under Japanese law at the time of the killing, on an international wanted list.
But there are slim prospects of the police being able to build a case against the two Filipinos as both of them left Japan after the murder.
In the trial at the Mito District Court, prosecutors said a DNA sample almost matching that of the defendant was found on the hand of the woman.
Source: ANNnewsCH
