TOKYO: Takahiro Shiraishi, the Japanese man who has reportedly confessed to murdering and hacking up nine young people in his Tokyo bathroom, was said to be a quiet schoolboy who would grow up to work on the fringes of the sex industry and become a suspected serial killer.
Pictures of the 27-year-old show an ordinary-looking man with neat, dark hair and glasses, who lived in a nondescript flat on a quiet residential street in one of Tokyo’s endless sprawling suburbs.
But on the morning of Halloween, police uncovered a grisly house of horrors behind Shiraishi’s front door: nine dismembered bodies with as many as 240 bone parts stashed in coolers and tool boxes, sprinkled with cat litter in a bid to hide the evidence.
People who lived in the neighborhood remembered the young Shiraishi as a “quiet child who was able to socialize with neighbors.”
At school, his grades were far from stellar but he was an attentive pupil, who “didn’t especially stand out but was not a gloomy character either,” according to a former classmate cited in the Asahi Shimbun.
He enjoyed athletics and baseball and was “a good listener rather than someone who would speak about himself,” another school contemporary told a local Tokyo paper.
One person claiming to be a former schoolmate took to Twitter saying he was so “normal, inconspicuous and low-profile” that most classmates would not even recognize him when news of his alleged crimes broke.
But the warning signs were perhaps there as one elementary-school contemporary told the private Fuji TV network that Shiraishi and his friends enjoyed choking each other for “fun.”
“He once passed out while playing the choking game,” the man, who did not wish to be identified, told the show.
The Mainichi Shimbun has reported that two of the bodies showed signs of strangulation, one had broken neck bones and another had bleeding patterns typically associated with choking.
After graduating from high school in 2009, Shiraishi got a full-time job at a supermarket but quit just over two years later.
At that point, he began to work as a scout for sex parlors in Kabukicho, Tokyo’s biggest red-light district, seeking to lure young women into working in the clubs there.
In February, he was arrested and eventually handed a suspended jail sentence for recruiting a young woman for a sex shop in the full knowledge that she would be pressed into prostitution.
Several people tweeted about a “creepy scout,” with one person apparently employed in the same business as the suspect posting a photo of him with the caption: “Watch out for this scout.”
Shiraishi appeared to have a close relationship with his father, a designer of automobile parts, after his mother and younger sister left to live closer to the girl’s school in central Tokyo.
And a woman who said she was in a relationship with him until summer 2016 described him as a “gentle character” who was “never angry with women.”
“When I told him that I wanted to break up, he hugged me and said something like ‘Don’t go’,” the women told Fuji TV.
Things started going downhill for Shiraishi around June this year when he is reported to have told his father: “I don’t know why I’m alive.”
On August 22, he moved into the one-room apartment in Zama, a southwestern suburb of Tokyo, that would become the apparent scene of multiple murders.
He set up several Twitter accounts, advertising himself as a “professional hangman” and contacting young women who said they had suicidal tendencies.
He is reported to have told investigators that he killed his victims “as soon as he met them” and then “did some work on the bodies” to cover up his alleged crimes.
According to the Japan Times, he told police that the first time he dismembered a body, it took him three days but that “from the second person, I was able to do it within a day.”
Several media report the police found scissors, knives, a saw and woodwork tools in his flat.
One former hostess said on Twitter she had a lucky escape after her parlor turned down Shiraishi, who wanted to take her on a “date.”
“The parlor politely declined it but if it hadn’t, I would have been dead, wouldn’t I? I get chills,” tweeted the woman.
Japan ‘serial killer’ was quiet schoolboy who did not stand out
Japan ‘serial killer’ was quiet schoolboy who did not stand out
Australia bans a citizen with alleged links to militant Daesh group from returning from Syria
- The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians and fly on Monday from Damascus to Australia, Burke said
- “These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents”
MELBOURNE: Australia’s government banned an Australian citizen with alleged ties to the militant Daesh group from returning home from a detention camp in Syria, the latest development in the case of fraught repatriation of families of Daesh fighters.
The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians — 10 women and 23 children — and fly on Monday from Damascus, Syria, to Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday.
But the group was turned back by Syrian authorities to the Roj detention camp, due to unspecified procedural problems.
The Australian government had acted on news that the group planned to leave Syria, Burke said. He said the woman, whom he did not identify, had been issued with a temporary exclusion order on Monday and her lawyers had been provided with the paperwork on Wednesday.
She was an immigrant who left Australia for Syria sometime between 2013 and 2015, Burke said, declining to elaborate on whether she had children — though he generally blamed the parents for the predicaments of their offspring stranded in Syria.
“These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents. They are terrible situations. But they have been brought on entirely by horrific decisions that their parents made,” Burke told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Burke has the power to use temporary exclusion orders to prevent high-risk citizens from returning to Australia for up to two years.
The laws were were introduced to in 2019 to prevent defeated Daesh fighters from returning to Australia. There are no public reports of an order being issued before.
Burke said security agencies had not advised that any of the other Australians in the group warranted an exclusion order. Such orders can’t be made against children younger than 14.
Confusing messages at a cramped camp
At the Roj camp, tucked in Syria’s northeastern corner near the border with Iraq, the Australian women who had expected to travel home refused to speak to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
One of the women, Zeinab Ahmad, said they had been advised by an attorney not to talk to journalists.
A security official at the camp, Chavrê Rojava, said that family members of the detainees — who she said were Australians of Lebanese origin — had traveled to Syria to arrange their return. They brought temporary passports that had been issued for the would-be returnees, Rojava said.
“We have no contact with the Australian government regarding this matter, as we are not part of the process,” she said. “We have left it to the families to resolve.”
Rojava said that after the group had departed the camp to travel to Damascus, they were contacted by a Syrian government official and warned to turn back. The families were “very disappointed” upon returning to the camp, she said.
“We recently requested that all countries and families come and take back their citizens,” Rojava said.
She added that Syrian authorities do not want to see a “repeat of what happened in Al-Hol camp” — a much larger camp, also in northeastern Syria that once housed tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, with alleged ties to Daesh.
Last month, during fighting between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which had controlled Al-Hol, guards abandoned their posts and many of the camp’s residents fled.
That raised concerns that Daesh members would regroup and stage new attacks in Syria.
The Syrian government then established control of Al-Hol and has begun moving its remaining residents to another camp in Aleppo province. The Kurdish-led force remains in control of Roj camp and a ceasefire is now in place.
The thorny issue of repatriating Daesh-linked foreign citizens
Former Daesh fighters from multiple countries, their wives and children have been detained in camps since the militant group lost control of its territory in Syria in 2019. Though defeated, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both Syria and Iraq.
Australian governments have repatriated Australian women and children from Syrian detention camps on two occasions. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday reiterated his position announced a day earlier that his government would not help repatriate the latest group.
“These are people who chose to go overseas to align themselves with an ideology which is the caliphate, which is a brutal, reactionary ideology and that seeks to undermine and destroy our way of life,” Albanese told reporters.
He was referring to the militants’ capture of wide swaths of land more than a decade ago that stretched across Syria and Iraq, territory where Daesh established its so-called caliphate. Militant from foreign countries traveled to Syria at the time to join the Daesh. Over the years, they had families and raised children there.
“We are doing nothing to repatriate or to assist these people. I think it’s unfortunate that children are caught up in this, that’s not their decision, but it’s the decision of their parents or their mother,” Albanese added.
