TOKYO — Japanese officials protested to the United States on Friday after police arrested a man identified as a former U.S. Marine in connection with the killing of a woman on the island of Okinawa.
TOKYO — Japanese officials protested to the United States on Friday after police arrested a man identified as a former U.S. Marine in connection with the killing of a woman on the island of Okinawa.
“I am extremely upset. I have no words,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters at his residence Friday. “I demand that the United States take strict measures to prevent something like this from happening again.”
The suspect was identified by Okinawa police as Kenneth Franklin Shinzato, 32. He was arrested Thursday after he admitted strangling a 20-year-old woman, Rina Shimabukuro, and dumping her body in a weeded area near her home in the town of Uruma, according to news reports.
The reports were based on background briefings by police and prosecutors and could not be independently verified.
Shimabukuro was reported missing April 29. Her boyfriend told the police she had disappeared the previous night after texting him to say she was going for a walk, the news reports said.
Crimes committed by Americans have long been a source of friction on Okinawa, a small southern island that hosts about half of the roughly 50,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan.
The most notorious incident, the rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by three American servicemen in 1995, set off mass protests against the U.S. military presence.
The latest incident comes just a week before President Barack Obama is scheduled to travel to Japan for a meeting of leaders from the Group of 7 leading industrialized countries. The trip is already politically sensitive because Obama plans to visit Hiroshima, site of the U.S. nuclear bombing at the end of World War II. He will be the first sitting American president to do so.
Japan’s foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, summoned Ambassador Caroline Kennedy on Friday to protest the killing on Okinawa, which he called “an extremely cruel and atrocious crime.” Okinawa’s governor, Takeshi Onaga, who has campaigned to reduce the U.S. military presence on the island, told reporters Thursday that the crime had left him “speechless.”
“This incident has occurred precisely because the base is there,” Onaga was quoted by the local news media as saying. “I don’t know what to do with this anger.”
Shinzato is no longer a Marine but is employed in a civilian role at Kadena Air Base, a U.S. Air Force facility on Okinawa, police said. He was questioned by police after his car was spotted on security-camera footage taken near the area where Shimabukuro is believed to have disappeared, news reports said.
DNA matching Shimabukuro’s was found in the car, according to the reports.
Shinzato was arrested on suspicion of illegally disposing of a body, a common early step in murder investigations in Japan. Police can hold suspects for several weeks before pressing formal charges.
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