National News

Police find two bodies of men 'buried alive'

Police searching for two missing 21-year-old men found two bodies at an industrial site in the city of Okayama on June 27 after a man arrested for assault confessed to burying them alive there.

The two — a senior at Higashiosaka College in Osaka Prefecture and a company employee from Nara Prefecture — have been missing for a week after being abducted and assaulted by a group of nine people.

Ryuji Kobayashi, 21, and the others abducted three people, including the two men, by car from Okayama on June 19

Kobayashi and others first assaulted the three at a park in Tamano, Okayama Prefecture, and then moved them to the waste disposal site and resumed beating them up.

They buried the college student at the site alive and took the company employee away in a car and locked him inside the car trunk for one day. They returned to the site and buried him there.

The third man, a company employee, was released, and he went to the police June 22, telling them that two men had been killed.

Of the people arrested in the case, Yuta Tokumitsu, a 21-year-old part-time worker, and Yuki Sato, a 21-year-old student at Higashiosaka College, had earlier been assaulted by the two missing men in a dispute over a woman.

Kobayashi is believed to have planned the attack after Sato, who went to the same junior high school, asked him for help. (Kyodo)

Shukan ST: July 7, 2006

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