Sayonara, scumbags:TOKYO (AFP) — Japan on Tuesday executed three people including notorious serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, a fetishist convicted of murdering four little girls and eating some of their bodies, officials said. Miyazaki, 45, was nicknamed the "killer nerd" for his obsession with sexual cartoons and pornography. But defence lawyers contended he was mentally ill and could not be held fully responsible for his actions.
Japan is the only major industrialised nation other than the United States to apply the death penalty and has been stepping up the pace of executions, which enjoy wide public support. "We are carrying out executions by selecting the people whom we can execute with a feeling of confidence and responsibility," Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama told a news conference.
Miyazaki was arrested in July 1989 while trying to take naked pictures of a girl outdoors and the details that emerged from his case stunned Japan. He confessed to having killed four girls, aged between four and seven, in Tokyo and its suburbs and eating some of the remains of two of them.
Miyazaki mutilated the bodies of the victims, slept next to the corpses and drank their blood. He sent letters to the media under a woman's name claiming responsibility for the crimes and sent a box containing the remains of a slaughtered girl to her family.
"The atrocious murder of four girls to satisfy his sexual desire leaves no room for leniency," Chief Justice Tokiyasu Fujita said in January 2006 when he upheld his death sentence.