Man Who Held Young Girl Captive 9 Years Is Arrested

A man accused of abducting a girl off the street and keeping her in his bedroom for nine years had bound her legs and threatened to abandon her in the mountains if she tried to flee, police and news reports said Friday.

Nobuyuki Sato, 37, was arrested Friday on suspicion of abducting Fusako Sano, now 19, and imprisoning her in his second-floor bedroom, said a police spokesman identifying himself only as Mizuno.

Sato has admitted to most of the charges against him, the spokesman said. In 1990, Sato was driving around the city of Sanjo, about 160 miles north of Tokyo, when he spotted the girl and pulled her into his car, national broadcaster NHK reported, citing his deposition.

Sano, a 9-year-old fourth-grader at the time, was last seen watching a baseball game in a schoolyard.

During the next nine years, Sano has said, she never ventured from the second story of her captor’s house in a town outside Sanjo.

For the first three months of her captivity, Sano was bound hand and foot with tape and threatened with abandonment, NHK and Kyodo News agency reported. As time passed, she said, she became too afraid to attempt an escape.

Police also were questioning Sato’s mother, who lived in the house, Mizuno said.

The mother reportedly has said she did not know about her son’s captive. Media reports said that the son was violent and that the mother was afraid to go to the second floor.

But police say they now believe that Sato’s mother prepared meals for him and his captive.

Sato has a troubled history. Neighbors said he became increasingly violent after his father died in 1989. They saw him break doors and windows in the family house, and noticed that his mother once had a black eye, NHK said.

He was arrested in 1989 for trying to kidnap a girl and was on probation when Sano disappeared, but police apparently never investigated him.

This year, on Jan. 28, police answered a call about a man causing a disturbance at a hospital, and found Sato and Sano when they arrived. Sano approached officers and told her story.

Sato was hospitalized for mental instability and violent behavior that day. He was released Friday, and arrested when doctors said he was mentally competent to answer investigators’ questions, Mizuno said.