Tokyo (AFP)

A 30-year-old Japanese man was sentenced to death by a Tokyo court on Tuesday for murdering nine people in 2017 he lured to his home after approaching them on Twitter.

Takahiro Shiraishi admitted during his trial to having killed and dismembered in his apartment nine people aged 15 to 26, including eight women, in the space of just two months.

"I get it," he calmly said in court on Tuesday when the judges asked him if he heard the verdict correctly.

As early as last month, the accused had said he was "ready" to accept such a verdict, thus ruling out the possibility of appealing.

However, he was not immediately sure that he would stick to this resolution.

His lawyers had pleaded for a prison sentence arguing that his victims, who had expressed suicidal thoughts on social networks, had given him their consent to die.

But this version of the facts, disputed by the accused himself, was rejected by the court, as was the attempt by his lawyers to highlight possible psychiatric disorders in their client in order to try to obtain a more lenient verdict. .

- Dignity "trampled" of the victims -

"None of the nine victims consented to be killed, even tacitly," according to statements by the trial judge reported by public broadcaster NHK.

The judge also denounced facts "of extreme gravity" and stressed that the "dignity" of the victims had been "trampled".

Takahiro Shiraishi had dismembered their corpses and stored them in his small apartment in Zama, in the large southwestern suburb of Tokyo.

On October 31, 2017, the police discovered a real house of horrors in his home: 240 pieces of human remains hidden in coolers and tool boxes, sprinkled with kitty litter in an attempt to mask the smell of rotting.

Scissors, knives, a saw and various carpentry tools had been found at his home.

This case shocked Japan, a country where the crime rate is very low, and had also had a strong international impact.

Because beyond the particularly sordid details of the case, Takahiro Shiraishi spotted his prey on Twitter, a very popular social network, telling them that he could help them in their suicidal plans or even die at their side.

- "Professional executioner" -

Police finally arrested him while investigating the disturbing disappearance of a 23-year-old woman, whose brother was able to log into her Twitter account, where he noticed exchanges with a suspicious account.

Which turned out to be one that Mr. Shiraishi used to present himself as a "professional executioner".

Before becoming a murderer, this ordinary, self-effacing man had worked for a few years as a recruiter of young women for adult clubs in Kabukicho, Tokyo's big red light district.

The affair of the "Twitter killer", as the Japanese press had dubbed it, had revived in Japan debates on the control of social networks as well as on suicide and its prevention.

Japan has the highest suicide rate among the industrialized G7 countries, with around 20,000 people terminating their lives per year, out of a total population of around 126 million.

These figures have fallen since a peak reached in 2003, but they have started to rise again in recent months, against the backdrop of a pandemic worsening situations of psychological distress and loneliness.

Japan is one of the rare industrialized countries not to have abolished the death penalty and public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of its retention.

The death penalty for Mr. Shiraishi is "appropriate", the father of one of the victims told NHK, although "I don't know how to appease my anger".

Japan currently has more than 100 people on death row, and many years usually elapse between sentencing and execution by hanging.

The last execution in Japan dates back a year, that of a Chinese convicted of the murders of four members of the same family in the southwest of the country in 2003.

© 2020 AFP