Four found dead in suspected group suicide
Four people were found dead inside a vehicle in northern Japan today, in what appeared to be the country’s latest group suicide pact, police said.
The three men and a woman were found by a construction worker in a rented station wagon parked in a vacant lot in Ebetsu, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, said Ebetsu police spokesman Shinichi Watanabe.
Investigators found five portable stoves containing charcoal in the vehicle and its windows sealed with tape from the inside.
Police believed the four died from carbon monoxide poisoning, Watanabe said.
They have not been identified and officials were trying to determine how they were acquainted, he said.
Japan has been the scene of a spate of suicide pacts in recent months, many thought to have been plotted by people who met over the internet.
Suicide pacts have been made over the internet since the late 1990s, and have been reported everywhere from Guam to the Netherlands. Experts say they tend to occur in cycles, with news of group suicides sparking copycat incidents.
Earlier this month, nine bodies were found in two separate cars in central Japan – one group of six people on an isolated farm road south of Tokyo and the other, a group of one man and two women, in front of an empty holiday home in a resort area to the west.
Suicides in Japan hit a record high in 2003, exceeding 34,000.
Ebetsu, near Hokkaido’s state capital of Sapporo, lies 514 miles north-east of Tokyo.
