A mother in
Japan is under investigation for murder after her four children, including a
girl as young as three, were found dead at home, Japanese media reports and
police said Monday.
Local media
reported the victims were killed by their mother before she tried to take her
own life.
A 10-year-old
boy, two six-year-old girls, and a three-year-old girl were found dead early
Monday, according to police in the southern Japanese prefecture of Fukuoka.
“Their father
found them dead and reported it to police,” a police spokesman told AFP,
without providing further details.
Police are
questioning the children’s 41-year-old mother as a suspect in a possible murder-suicide
attempt, according to Jiji Press and public broadcaster NHK.
The mother
confessed to police she had killed the children, according to TV Asahi.
Police
reportedly told media that at least one child had a mark indicating
strangulation.
The mother was
sent to hospital as her wrist was bleeding, the Asahi Shimbun daily said. She
told police she cut herself with a kitchen knife but her injury was mild.
Murder-suicide
cases are not uncommon in Japan and usually involve a mother killing her child
or children.
Some
parent-child murder-suicides have been attributed to poverty. In 2014, a single
mother in Chiba prefecture killed her teenage daughter and tried to kill
herself apparently because she could no longer afford to pay the rent.
On Monday, a
mother and her two sons aged six and one, went missing in Gunma prefecture,
northwest of Tokyo, and her car was found near a river.
Police suspect
that the mother and her sons jumped into the river in a murder-suicide, the
Sankei Shimbun daily reported.
Last month, a
mother in Chiba prefecture killed herself after stabbing her three children,
according to local media. Her 10-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son were
confirmed dead.
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