Japan pension probe finds five-year-old corpse at home
AFP September 1, 2010 7:02 AM
TOKYO - A 58-year-old woman has admitted to keeping her father's corpse hidden at home for five years, in Japan's latest case of suspected pension fraud, local media reported Wednesday. The man's decomposing body was discovered after a welfare official visited a home in Izumi, near Osaka, in western Japan, as part of a nationwide search to verify the whereabouts of elderly people, the reports said.
The reports did not say whether the woman, who was not named, had been arrested or charged but public broadcaster NHK quoted her admitting to police that she had hidden the body. "I found my father dead in his bed about five years ago when I returned home. I hid the body in a bag when it started decomposing after I left it as it was," NHK quoted the woman as telling police.
The woman's father was named as Asakichi Miyata, a former banker who was believed to have been paid a pension which his daughter continued to receive, Kyodo news agency reported, quoting city and police officials. Osaka police were not immediately available to confirm the reports.
The welfare official had visited Miyata's house as part of a nationwide drive for face-to-face meetings with Japan's elderly after the discovery of a 30-year-old, mummified body of a man thought to have been alive at 111. Tokyo police arrested the man's daughter, 81, and granddaughter, 53, last Friday on suspicion of receiving his pension payments, worth nine million yen (106,000 U.S. dollars).
That case has prompted officials to check on hundreds of aged people, especially centenarians, listed as still alive in Japanese official records. So far about 200 centenarians have been found to be missing from places where they were last registered. In another case, the remains of a Tokyo woman believed to be 104 were found stuffed into her son's backpack, where they had been for more than a decade.
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