Police in Ishikawa Prefecture said on Sunday that a woman's body found in the mountains of Fukui Prefecture was that of Saya Nakada, 26, a restaurant worker from Nonoichi, Ishikawa Prefecture, and that she died of acute suffocation caused by compression of the neck.
The identification, announced after a judicial autopsy, widens a case that began as a confinement arrest into a homicide investigation. The Asahi Shimbun reported that prefectural police are now examining suspicion of murder and of abandoning a body.
Officers from the Hakusan police station arrested Takashi Utsunomiya, 49, an unemployed man from Kawauchi 6-chome in Asaminami Ward, Hiroshima, on Friday. He is suspected of holding Nakada in his own car between about 5:15 a.m. and about 2:30 p.m. on October 30.
Utsunomiya told investigators he had killed Nakada and abandoned her in the mountains, according to the report. Police began searching on Saturday morning and found the body in the mountains of Awara, Fukui Prefecture, at about 10:20 a.m.
Earlier call to police
Nakada phoned the prefectural police headquarters on the night of July 28 and said she wanted to end her relationship with her partner, the Hakusan station said. An officer visited her and told her to call 110 — Japan's emergency police number — if anything happened.
Police believe Utsunomiya was that partner and that some kind of trouble had arisen between the two.