TOKYO, Japan - A high school student was arrested on suspicion of killing and dismembering her 15-year-old classmate, police told local media on Monday. The 16-year-old suspect confessed to police that she beat the other girl and choked her to death with a rope in the city of Sasebo in Japan's Nagasaki prefecture.
The girls, who were not being identified by authorities, were acquaintances, according to their school principal. "We never heard of any trouble between them,” the principal told local media. “I'm absolutely shocked by this.” The suspect lived in her own apartment since her mother passed away last year and her father remarried, local media said. The killing echoes a similar case in the same city a decade ago in which an 11-year-old student stabbed and killed her friend with a hobby knife in a classroom.