60681    Concerning the murder case of Mari Uehara, the eldest daughter of Atsushi Uehara, a company employee from Anesaki, Ichihara of Chiba, the ad hoc task force comprising the homicide section of Chiba Prefectural Police and the Ichihara Police Station arrested on the evening of December 31 Toru Uehara, a bookseller and Mari's uncle and cohabiter, on charges of her murder and abandonment of her body, following the preceding arrest on suspicion of kidnapping her, a minor, on the previous day.

60682    According to the police investigation, the suspect picked up Mari, who came back from a friend's home in neighborhood, with a light sedan in front of their home around 5:10 p.m., December 28, drove her about three kilometers to the south, and let her out of the car in the precincts of an industrial water treatment plant in Daijuku, Sodegaura of Chiba (belongs to Prefectural Corporation Agency), strangled her to death, and abandoned her body in a bamboo forest nearby.

60683    A legal autopsy was performed on the corpse on December 31 at the School of Medicine, Chiba University, and the cause of her death was determined to be strangulation.

60684    Around 7:30 a.m., December 31, Yusuke Takei, a company worker from Shimizu 1-chome, Suginami-ku, Tokyo, and Toyota Okada, a wood shop manager from Kamikurata-cho, Totsuka, Yokohama of Kanagawa, slipped and fell into a stream while climbing Mt. Kai Komaga-take in Yamanashi Prefecture around four-fifths of the way to the peak; Takei is still missing.

60685    Okada was rescued by his three fellow party members, with a serious injury of fracture of the right leg.

60686    As snow is falling on the site, the Nagasaka Police Station in charge will start searching for Takei in the early morning of January 1.

60687    Around 3:25 p.m. of December 31, the Tokyo head office of Asahi Shimbun (5-chome, Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo) reported to the Tsukiji Police Station, "Two suspicious cardboard boxes were delivered by courier service."

60688    As the boxes were heavy, weighing five and twelve kilograms respectively, the Station and the Metropolitan Police Department suspected the possibility of the boxes containing explosives, and dispatched a bomb squad of about fifty members, and opened them over approximately three hours using such measures as freezing them.

60689    However, it turned out that the boxes were only jam-packed with used notebooks and such stuff.

60690    There was no trace of explosives or threatening letters.

60691    In the obituary of Mr. Kenji Anpo, carried on page 25 of the morning issue of December 31, the date and time of his funeral and service were mistakenly printed as "11:00 a.m., January 4," while it should have been "11:00 a.m., January 5."

60692    On December 31, Ogaki Police Station of the Gifu Prefectural Police took into protective custody a boy in the first grade of junior high school, who had been missing since he left home in Yokohama on December 26, saying, "I'm going to Tokyo Station"; the Police also arrested Hidenori Nagasaka, of no fixed address and claiming to be a private school manager, who was found together with the boy in a hotel in Ogaki, on suspicion of kidnapping him, a minor.

60693    According to the investigation so far, the boy is the eldest son of a builder of Hodogaya, Yokohama of Kanagawa.

60694    On December 23, the suspect talked to the boy in the Transportation Museum in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, and called him on the 26th to promise to meet at the Tokyo Station.

60695    As the boy did not come home after dark, his mother asked the Hodogaya Police Station of Kanagawa Prefectural Police to search for him.