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Japan Today
30-07-2025
- Japan Today
1995 Hachioji supermarket triple murder case remains unsolved after 30 years
Police in Tokyo on Wednesday renewed their call to the public for help in solving a triple murder at a supermarket in Tokyo's Hachioji in 1995. The National Police Agency is offering a 6 million yen reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or persons responsible for the murders of Megumi Yabuki, 17, Hiromi Maeda, 16, and Noriko Inagaki, 47. The Special Investigation Headquarters has received a total of 1,678 tips over the past 30 years, and 32 in the past year, NHK reported. At around 9:15 p.m. on July 30, 1995, the three employees — all part-time workers at the Nampei Owada supermarket in Hachioji city — were shot and killed in the store's second floor office. Each had been bound with tape and killed with a single gunshot to the head. Thirty years on, there has been no resolution to the case, although there are some theories. Initial police reports described it as a failed robbery attempt, since none of the three employees knew the combination of the store's safe. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police said that fingerprints lifted off the tape used to bind the victims, believed to be that of the perpetrator, were found to match closely those of a Japanese male who died of natural causes in 2005. Initially, those fingerprints were not considered complete enough to make a conclusive match that would be admissible as evidence. However, investigators, after extensive searches of print databases, believe that the prints correspond closely with a man who lived in the Tama district in west Tokyo. Normally, the legal criteria for a fingerprint match are correspondence at 12 or more points, which is why the initial searches of data bases failed to narrow down a suspect. An 8-point match is still said to have an accuracy of about 100 million to one. While the prints left behind on the tape could not provide a 12-point match, the man's prints were in the data base due to his having a prior criminal record. At the time of the killings, police found nothing to suggest the man had been in the area where the crimes took place. At this point, police concede that the 8-point fingerprint match is not conclusive, and would be insufficient to be used as evidence in solving the case. Police said they are still trying to establish links between the dead suspect and the murder weapon, an illegal handgun believed to have been manufactured in the Philippines. Police pursued an earlier lead in 2009, when a Japanese man on death row in China for drug trafficking made a statement that a Chinese man in Canada was involved in the Hachioji murders, as part of a gang of Japanese and Chinese who carried out a series of robberies in Japan in the 1990s. The Chinese man, Liang He, had been wanted in Japan for using a forged passport to leave the country in 2002. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 2006. The National Police Agency first filed an extradition request with Canadian authorities in 2010 with the Ontario High Court. Liang filed an appeal that was rejected and he was extradited to Japan in 2013 where he was jailed for passport fraud. But he has refused to talk about the supermarket murders. Police ask that anyone with any information about the case call 042-621-0110. © Japan Today
Korea Herald
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Korea Herald
Ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol indicted for abuse of power
The prosecution investigating former President Yoon Suk Yeol's Dec. 3 declaration of martial law on Thursday indicted Yoon on charges of abuse of power. Yoon has been accused of obstruction of the exercise of rights through the abuse of power, a violation of Article 123 of the Criminal Act, when he declared martial law in December, according to the prosecution's Special Investigation Team led by Park Se-hyun, chief prosecutor at the Seoul High Prosecutors' Office. The prosecutor's Special Investigation Headquarters on Jan. 26 had earlier indicted Yoon, who was then still the sitting president, on the charge of leading an insurrection and begun the proceedings in his criminal trial Feb. 20 while he was under detention. He was released in a separate court decision March 8. The prosecutors have been moving ahead with the legal procedures for Yoon's criminal trial, while conducting supplementary investigations into the charge of abuse of power, which has now led to the additional indictment against Yoon. The ex-president was permanently removed by the Constitutional Court in a unanimous 8-0 decision on April 4. Meanwhile, Yoon -- whose criminal trial on charges of orchestrating an insurrection opened on Feb. 20 -- denied all allegations in two formal hearings held in April, claiming his Dec. 3 martial law declaration was a 'message to the public' and did not constitute an act of insurrection.
