A Peruvian man arrested in April on suspicion of murdering a 19-year-old Russian woman in the Japanese city of Yokohama has confessed to the murder, Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday, referring to police sources in the Kanagawa prefecture.
Restaurant worker Max Enrique Pinedo Toguchi confessed he had stabbed his girlfriend Anna Filimonova at her apartment in Yokohama in an “outburst of anger.”
Until now, Pinedo Toguchi maintained his innocence.
A personal quarrel is the likely cause for the murder, according to the police.
The police have been investigating Pinedo Toguchi after a security camera captured him and the victim at the entrance to her apartment at about 7 a.m. the same day in April.
Toguchi was suspected of killing his girlfriend at her home by stabbing her more than 10 times in the chest and elsewhere at around 8 a.m. on April 19.
The police retrieved a kitchen knife from a river in front of the apartment but Pinedo Toguchi said at the time, “I did not dump it.”
Before his confession, Pinedo Toguchi maintained he had found the victim’s body when he visited her apartment together with a Japanese man at about 3 a.m. on April 20, after he had been unable to reach her by phone.