Japanese woman pays 33-year-old man to kill her

TOKYO – A Japanese man who ran a website offering help with suicide has been arrested for allegedly killing a woman who paid him to arrange her death, an official said yesterday.

Police said 33-year-old Kazunari Saito is accused of giving sleeping pills to Sayaka Nishizawa, 21, and then suffocating her after she gave him $1 700. Saito, an electrician in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, set up a website designed offering himself for a variety of jobs, including helping people kill themselves.”I’ll do any job there is, legal or illegal.I’ll do anything – taking out revenge, drugs, assisting in death,” read one message on the website published by the Asahi Shimbun.The website could not be accessed yesterday.Saito told police he created the website because he needed money to have fun, Jiji Press reported.Japan in recent years has seen a spate of heavily publicised incidents in which strangers who meet on the internet make suicide pacts and die together from carbon monoxide poisoning in sealed cars.In March, a court sentenced a man to death for agreeing fake suicide pacts with three people and then suffocating them himself for pleasure.Japan has one of the industrial world’s highest suicide rates.The problem has grown worse since the economy slipped into recession in the 1990s, causing income disparity to widen, although the rate dropped slightly last year as the economy picked up.Last year Japanese police reported 32 155 suicides, nearly half of them by unemployed people scattered all over the country.Nampa-AFPSaito, an electrician in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, set up a website designed offering himself for a variety of jobs, including helping people kill themselves.”I’ll do any job there is, legal or illegal.I’ll do anything – taking out revenge, drugs, assisting in death,” read one message on the website published by the Asahi Shimbun.The website could not be accessed yesterday.Saito told police he created the website because he needed money to have fun, Jiji Press reported.Japan in recent years has seen a spate of heavily publicised incidents in which strangers who meet on the internet make suicide pacts and die together from carbon monoxide poisoning in sealed cars.In March, a court sentenced a man to death for agreeing fake suicide pacts with three people and then suffocating them himself for pleasure.Japan has one of the industrial world’s highest suicide rates.The problem has grown worse since the economy slipped into recession in the 1990s, causing income disparity to widen, although the rate dropped slightly last year as the economy picked up.Last year Japanese police reported 32 155 suicides, nearly half of them by unemployed people scattered all over the country.Nampa-AFP