Japan teen murder accused kept cat head in fridge: Report

Tokyo: A 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who allegedly confessed to decapitating a classmate kept a severed cat head in her refrigerator, a report said Tuesday.

The teen was arrested last week on suspicion of murdering fellow student Aiwa Matsuo, 15, after police discovered her dismembered body on a bed in the suspect`s home in the western Japanese city of Sasebo. The grisly case has attracted major media attention in a country with one of the world`s lowest crime rates, as commentators search for answers to explain the teenager`s pattern of increasingly violent behaviour. Some reports have suggested the parents of the girl -- who wasn`t named because she is a minor -- desperately sought to have her hospitalised but were rebuffed. On Tuesday, the Mainichi newspaper said investigators found a severed cat head in a refrigerator and about one million yen ($10,000) in cash at the apartment where the girl lived alone. She had reportedly been living there since April on the advice of psychiatrists after she battered her father with a baseball bat. Her father -- who remarried about three months ago after the girl`s mother died of cancer last year -- is believed to have given the cash to his daughter, who reportedly told investigators that she "wanted to dissect someone". The man has been quoted as saying that "my daughter`s act can never be forgiven". Also Tuesday, the Mainichi and Jiji Press news agency reported that the suspect told her stepmother that she planned to murder a person after growing bored of killing animals. A day before the incident, her parents consulted with a psychiatrist and tried to get the girl hospitalised but the request was turned down due to lack of space at the facility, Jiji said. The father then called a local child welfare office, but a security guard told him to telephone back after the weekend.