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https://scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2134815/us-man-cut-woman-he-met-online-and-left-her-body-parts-scattered East Asia
US man ‘cut up woman he met online and left her body parts scattered across mountains outside two Japanese cities’
Journalists gather near the location where body parts believed to be those of a missing woman were found in Osaka, western Japan, on Monday. Photo: Yuki Sato/Kyodo News via AP
A US tourist in Japan murdered a girl he met on a dating app, chopped her up and scattered her body parts across the Japanese countryside, police have alleged.
Yevgeniy Vasilievich Bayraktar, 26, was arrested on Thursday after a woman he was seen with vanished. Her severed head was found on Saturday, inside a suitcase in an Osaka flat he was renting, according to local officials.
Police said he admitted to killing the 27-year-old woman from Sanda, Hyogo Prefecture, and then directed them to the locations of her body parts, which had been scattered in mountainous areas of Shimamoto, Osaka Prefecture and Kyoto’s Yamashina Ward.
The victim’s severed head was found in a suitcase in this building in Osaka, Japan, on Saturday. Photo: EPA-EFE
The torso was found on the ground and the arms covered with soil at the same location in Shimamoto. Both legs were found in Yamashina.
There were no traces of wounds besides the cuts made to dismember the body. The victim has not been identified.
Bayraktar, a US national who entered Japan in late January, was the last person seen with the woman.
The two had been in contact through a dating app that matches Japanese people with foreigners, sources said.
The police are set to serve a fresh arrest warrant on the man for the disposal and damaging of a body. He was first taken into custody over suspected imprisonment of the victim.
Bayraktar is believed to have stayed in a number of flats rented to tourists since arriving in Japan.
Video footage taken by a surveillance camera at one such building in Osaka’s Higashinari Ward showed the man and the missing woman entering.
She was not seen in subsequent footage, but he was seen repeatedly going in and out of the building alone with a travel bag, according to investigative sources.
Since traces of blood were detected in the condominium, the police think that the man is likely to have dismembered the body there and carried the body parts out to discard them.
A large amount of air-freshener had been used in the condo and part of the woman’s driving licence was found there also, sources said.
The man had been staying at the condominium from around February 12, while the woman headed toward Osaka on February 15 after leaving work.
He had taken several other women to the same condominium, but police have confirmed that none of them have been harmed.