A former Japanese businessman charged with serial rape and killing two foreign women, including Briton Lucie Blackman in 2000, faces a court verdict on Tuesday in a case experts call the worst sex crime in Japanese history.
Former property developer Joji Obara, 54, is charged with total of 10 cases of rape, including drugging, raping and killing Blackman, a 21-year-old former British Airways flight attendant who was working at a hostess bar in Tokyo when she disappeared seven years ago.
Mr Obara also faces the same charge in the death of an Australian woman in 1992, and has been indicted for drugging and raping eight other women.
"One person carrying out so many such cases, it's the first in our country's history," said Takeshi Tsuchimoto, a former prosecutor and professor at Hakuoh University Law School.
Blackman, from Kent in southeast England, was working in Tokyo's Roppongi nightlife district, when she went missing on July 1st, 2000. Prosecutors have said Obara took her to his beach-front condominium just southwest of Tokyo that day and made her drinks laced with sleeping pills and other drugs before raping her.
Mr Obara has told the court that he did drink alcohol and watch videos with Blackman in his room that night, but that she was fine when he left her the next day.
Last September a friend of Mr Obara paid 100 million yen ($840,000) as a "condolence payment" to the father. Tim Blackman accepted the money, vowing to donate a substantial amount of it to a charity set up in his daughter's name, but his ex-wife, Lucie's mother, criticised him, saying the action could affect the sentencing.
When Blackman disappeared, her family launched a campaign to find her, leading to a massive manhunt by Japanese police and bringing international attention to the case.
In March, a young British woman was found dead in a bathtub filled with sand near Tokyo, leading to intensive coverage by the Japanese media and prompting comparisons with Blackman's case.
Police have issued an arrest warrant and launched a nationwide hunt for a 28-year-old Japanese man over the death of Lindsay Ann Hawker, 22, an English teacher from Brandon near Coventry, but he has not been caught. Foreign hostesses from many countries work in Roppongi, where men pay hundreds of dollars an hour to drink and chat with them. But many work illegally on tourist visas, making it difficult for them to report trouble to police.
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