Filipino man arrested for 2004 murder of young Japanese woman

September 3, 2017

MITO, IBARAKI PREF.- Police on Saturday arrested a 35-year-old Filipino man on suspicions including murder over a 2004 case in which a female Japanese university student in Ibaraki Prefecture, eastern Japan, was strangled.

Arrested was Lampano Jerico Mori, a factory worker living in the city of Mizuho in the central Japan prefecture of Gifu.

Mori is alleged to have strangled Misato Harada, 21, a second-year student at Ibaraki University's College of Agriculture, to death in the Ibaraki village of Miho around between midnight on Jan. 30, 2004, and 6:30 a.m. on the following day in conspiracy with two other Filipino men.

The police will put Mori's two suspected accomplices, 33 and 31, on an international wanted list after obtaining arrest warrants for them. They left Japan in 2007, according to investigative sources.

The body of the victim was found at a river in Miho around 9 a.m. on Jan. 31, 2004. The place where her body was discovered was about 6 kilometers from an apartment in the neighboring town of Ami, where she was living alone.

DNA profiles of multiple persons that were collected from what was left on Harada's body matched those of Mori and the other men, the sources said.

At the time of the crime, Mori was living in the Ibaraki city of Tsuchiura, which neighbors Ami.

Harada went out around midnight on Jan. 30, 2004, after having a meal with a male student, who was a friend of hers, at her apartment. She is believed to have been murdered later. Jiji Press