Japan Girl Murder Inmate Arrested for Stabbing of Another Girl in 2006

Jiji Press

13:54 JST, November 7, 2024

Kobe (Jiji Press)—A 45-year-old inmate serving an indefinite prison sentence for the 2004 murder of a girl in Okayama Prefecture, western Japan, was arrested Thursday in a case in which another girl was stabbed and seriously injured in the neighboring prefecture of Hyogo in 2006.

Hyogo prefectural police arrested the inmate, Kunihiko Katsuta, on suspicion of attempted murder, according to investigative sources.

As Katsuta has also hinted at his involvement in the 2007 murder of a 7-year-old girl in the Hyogo city of Kakogawa, police are searching for evidence.

In the 2006 case, the girl, in the fourth grade of elementary school, was stabbed in the chest and other places with a knife on her way home from a private tutoring school in the city of Tatsuno at around 6:20 p.m. on Sept. 28, 2006. Police have been seeking information about the case after releasing surveillance camera footage of a man near the stabbing scene about a minute after the incident.

On Oct. 16, 2007, meanwhile, Yuzuki Unose was stabbed in the left chest with a knife outside her home in Kakogawa. The police headquarters for the case has deployed a total of about 54,200 investigators, while receiving about 560 reports of information possibly related to the case.

While in prison in 2018 for a different attempted murder case, Katsuta was arrested and indicted in the 2004 case, in which he was found to have intruded into a house in the Okayama city of Tsuyama and strangled and stabbed a 9-year-old girl to death.

His prison sentence was finalized in September 2023 after the Supreme Court dismissed the defense side’s appeal.