Beijing Urges Tokyo to Solve Murder of Chinese Women in Japan

China's foreign ministry on Friday urged local police to solve the case in which two Chinese citizens were found to be murdered after they had been missing in Japan last week.

"Japanese police has identified the two bodies as the missing Chinese citizens," Geng Shuang, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, told a press conference on Wednesday.

"The Chinese Embassy in Japan has demanded Japan to solve the case with full efforts to catch and punish the murderer," Geng said, noting that the embassy would closely follow the process of the investigation and offer assistance to the victims' relatives.

According to Geng, the embassy on Tuesday received an urgent rescue request from a Chinese citizen, reporting that his two daughters had been missing in Japan.

Police in Kanagawa, Japan announced on Friday that the two bodies were found in bags in the woods on a mountain of Hadano city at around 11:40 pm on Thursday, Japan's Asahi Shimbun reported.

The Asahi Shimbun said that the two women, 25 and 22 years old, lived in an apartment of Yokohama, Japan, 56 kilometers from Hadano.

China's news website thepaper.cn cited a person familiar with the case as saying that one of the victims had an affair with a Japanese man.

"Tokyo Chinese Association," a WeChat platform, cited a friend of the missing women as saying that a suspicious man had entered and exited the women's apartment in the early morning of July 6 with a key, which was recorded by monitoring cameras, according to thepaper.cn.

This article was first published in the Global Times.