Police find suspected human bone after confession by ex-gang boss

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said on Nov. 30 that it has found what appears to be part of a human bone in a mountain forest in the Saitama Prefecture town of Tokigawa where a former gang boss confessed to abandoning the body of a man who has been unaccounted for since 1998.

Investigators are set to try to identify the remains through DNA analysis and other means. Police have been looking for the man's body after Osamu Yano, the 67-year-old former boss of a crime syndicate, confessed to his involvement in the killing of the man. Yano was sentenced to death for ordering accomplices to open fire at a bar in the Gunma Prefecture city of Maebashi in 2003 in which four people were killed.

Yano submitted a written statement to the MPD through his lawyer in September 2014. The statement says that Yano abducted and confined Mamoru Saito over money trouble before strangling him. Saito ran a real-estate company in Tokyo at the time he went missing at the age of 49. The statement also says that Yano had an acquaintance abandon Saito's body.

Following Yano's confession, investigators unsuccessfully searched for Saito's body in the Tokigawa mountain forest in July and November this year. A worker who was putting soil into a hole on Nov. 29 that was dug for the search found what appeared to be a bone of the lower part of a human body, investigative sources say.

Saito appeared before the Diet in 1997 to testify as a sworn witness over the "Orange Kyosai Kumiai" mutual aid society fraud led by a former House of Councillors legislator. Saito went missing after having business talks in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo's Toshima Ward on April 5, 1998.