Murder inmate arrested for stabbing of another girl in Japan

Murder inmate arrested for stabbing of another girl in Japan

Kunihiko Katsuta is taken to Hyogo Prefectural Police's Tatsuno police station on Thursday after he was arrested for an attempted murder.

A 45-year-old inmate serving an indefinite prison sentence for the 2004 murder of a girl in Okayama

Prefecture was arrested Thursday in a separate case in which another girl was stabbed and seriously injured in the neighboring prefecture of Hyogo in 2006.

Hyogo police arrested the inmate, Kunihiko Katsuta, on suspicion of attempted murder. He has admitted to stabbing the girl with a knife but denied murderous intent, 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, a fourth grader at the time, 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 that year.

Katsuta has expressed words of apology over the incident, police sources said.

Police began questioning him on a voluntary basis in May. The inmate initially denied involvement in the Tatsuno case, but later admitted to carrying out the stabbing. Thursday's arrest came after police confirmed that there was no contradiction between the method of the crime and Katsuta's statements.

On Oct. 16, 2007, meanwhile, Yuzuki Unose was stabbed in the left chest with a knife outside her home in Kakogawa. Before she died, she told the ambulance crew that she had been stabbed by a man. But the lack of physical evidence, such as the weapon, has made the investigation difficult.

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 for a different attempted murder case, Katsuta was arrested and indicted in 2018 for 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.