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Police in Hachioji, Tokyo, said Friday they have arrested a 26-year-old unemployed woman from Chiba city and a 17-year-old youth from Nerima Ward in Tokyo on suspicion of abetting a suicide after they allowed a 28-year-old man and a 17-year-old woman to die in a car suicide pact.
The two suspects were also in the car. The four jointly agreed to commit suicide by sealing the car windows and burning coal briquettes.
According to police, the incident occurred on July 27, 2017. The four had met on a suicide site on social media. They rented a car and parked in a vacant area off a national route.
Police said they then set fire to the briquettes. A 28-year-old unemployed man from Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, and a 17-year-old girl from Kita Ward in Tokyo, were sitting in the back seat and lost consciousness. The two suspects told police they also started to black out due to the smoke but couldn’t go through with the suicide, so they got out of the car and left their companions as the inside of the car started burning.
There have been a number of suicide pacts this year where people met online. The government is encouraging private-sector groups to monitor SNS posts related to suicide. In January, Twitter Japan began allowing users to be linked to a nonprofit organization on suicide prevention work whenever words related to suicide are searched for, Kyodo reported.
© Japan Today
8 Comments
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Chip Star
What an effective response. We all know encouraging companies to do something is far more effective than legislating that companies do something.
starpunk
There shouldn't be suicide social media sites in the first place. That's horrible.
Yubaru
Legislating anything is not going to stop someone from committing suicide. The problem is how the article is written from the original Japanese. As it's written here, it certainly comes across as a crass response to a serious problem.
Diego3
There is no point in arresting them unless they are going to provide psychiatric care.
Ricky Kaminski13
Yeah, arrest them . That’s exactly what they need... Policing at its finest.
jforce
Well are they 17-year-old kids, youths, or adults?
sir_bentley28
They have NOTHING against these two. They have no motive, no proof that these two killed them, no fingerprints on the weapon used in their deaths. If there's no proof, the case is aloof.
Andrew Crisp
Amazing stuff people actually spend their time on these sites rather than trying to make their lives better.