Man Sentenced To Life In Prison For Murdering His Three Minor Children

A man has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his three children last year in Iizuka, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan.

The accused, identified as 43-year-old Ryoji Tanaka, who reportedly killed his three minor children, nine-year-old son Daisho, three-year-old son Rento, and two-year-old daughter Hina in February 2021, has been sentenced to life in prison by the Fukuoka District Court on Wednesday, Oct. 12, Japan Today reported.

Officers reportedly discovered the body of Daiso in Tanaka’s apartment in Iizuka, Fukuoka Prefecture.

A week after officers discovered Daiso's body, officers traced Tanaka to a hotel in Sakurajima where he and his other two children had been staying for two days. Sakurajima is a mountainous island in Kagoshima Bay in Kagoshima Prefecture. When police officers forced their way into the hotel room, Tanaka jumped from the fourth floor of the hotel to the ground. In the jump, Tanaka reportedly sustained several injuries to his torso.

In the hotel room, police found the bodies of the two children, Rento and Hina, along with a suicide note. Officers determined that Rento had been dead for about a week before his body was found.

The investigating officers also found unused briquettes in a car rented by Tanaka. When questioned by the officers, Tanaka later told them that he had initially planned to commit a murder-suicide with the children in the vehicle.

When investigating officers questioned Tanaka regarding the motive behind committing the crime, Tanaka’s defense was that he committed the murders because he was stressed out, as a single father, from looking after his three children, and worried about raising them.

The three minor children reportedly lived with their father Tanaka in the apartment where Daisho’s body was found.

In a similar but unrelated incident, an Indian man has been accused of bludgeoning his two daughters to death with a hammer and assaulting his wife before proceeding to take his own life by jumping from the roof of his apartment building. The incident happened in the Raipur district of Chhattisgarh state, India on Monday, Nov. 1, 2021, as previously reported.

Jhankar Bhaskar allegedly killed his young daughter Pari, 7, and toddler son Anshu, 3, by attacking them with a hammer in their apartment sometime after midnight on Monday, Nov. 1, 2021. After killing his children, he attacked his wife Sukrita, 28, and proceeded to take his own life by hurling himself off the roof of a six-story apartment complex.

The officers reportedly recovered a three-page suicide note from the crime scene.

In the letter, Bhaskar stated that he committed the brutal act since his wife constantly argued with him and suspected his involvement in the recent death of a stenographer who worked in his office. The stenographer Santosh Kanwar was found dead near a railway station about a month before the alleged murder-suicide.