Murder of Airi Kinoshita
2005 murder of a child in Hiroshima, Japan
Airi Kinoshita (木下あいり, Kinoshita Airi; 10 April 1998 – 22 November 2005) was a Japanese girl who was sexually assaulted and murdered in Hiroshima on 22 November 2005. José Manuel Torres Yake, a 33-year-old Peruvian wanted for child sexual abuse in Peru, was arrested and charged with Airi's murder a week later. Torres was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in July 2006.
Murder
On Tuesday 22 November 2005, Airi Kinoshita, a seven-year-old elementary school student from Hiroshima, disappeared on her way home from school. At 5 p.m. that day, a local resident discovered her corpse in a tape-bound cardboard box in a vacant lot in Hiroshima's Aki Ward. Injuries were found on her lower body that suggested she had been sexually assaulted. Her randoseru was later found alongside a road about 300 meters away, and had been carrying a so-called "crime prevention buzzer" but it was missing when her body was found. Around 300 people attended her funeral in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, her father Kenichi's hometown, with many mourners including Ground Self-Defense Force members who served with her father, a soldier. Kenichi Kinoshita stated: "I was deeply shocked when I was told by police that she was probably murdered," her father said in an address during the funeral, "I feel animosity toward the person who committed the crime.
The public source identifies “Murder of Airi Kinoshita” as 2005 murder of a child in Hiroshima, Japan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Murder, Airi and Kinoshita.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murder of Airi Kinoshita” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.