A court in Japan has sentenced a Japanese man to life imprisonment for murdering and robbing a Vietnamese woman in early April last year.

The defendant, 60-year-old Toshiie Yamaguchi, received the jail term at his trial opened at the Osaka Court in western Japan on Friday last week, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

The victim was Vo Thi Le Q., a Vietnamese national who was killed at age 31.

Yamaguchi was charged with murder and robbery, and concealment of the body of Q., according to the court’s judgment.

Q. was a part-time employee of a lunch box restaurant located on the first floor of a building in Osaka’s Yodogawa District, while Yamaguchi was a local office worker.

The woman had lived in Japan for five years after graduating from a university in Vietnam, according to her husband, also a Vietnamese.

On April 3 last year, after Q. was reported missing by her relatives, police came to the building for investigation and then discovered Yamaguchi lying unconscious with a neck stab wound in his flat on the second floor of the said building.

A day later, Q.’s body was found in a bag in the flat and an autopsy on the corpse confirmed that the woman had been killed.

After Yamaguchi recovered from his wound, he confessed to investigators that he had killed Q. and hidden her body after she refused to lend him money when they met at his flat on an appointment.

The man admitted to strangling Q. from behind to death and stole 26,000 Japanese yen in cash (about US$200) from her. He then used a bag and tape to hide her body.

Regarding the man’s neck injury, police said he could have committed suicide or wanted to create a false crime scene.

At the trial, Yamaguchi firmly denied the charges of murder and robbery, but presiding judge Ayako Nakagawa rejected his arguments, affirming that the collected proof, including the images recorded by relevant security cameras, was enough to prove his crimes.

The punishment for Yamaguchi was completely appropriate since he committed his crimes despicably, only for money, the judge concluded.

Attending the hearing session, Q.’s husband Pham Thanh Duy and the brother of the deceased said they were satisfied with the sentence, which helped partly relieve their great pain.

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