Japanese girl who poisoned mother to get treatment

TOKYO, May 1 (Reuters) A teenage Japanese girl who gradually poisoned her mother into a coma while keeping a blog about her worsening health will be sent for treatment in a reformatory, a court official said today.

The girl avoided a criminal trial after admitting attempting to murder her mother last year using thallium, sometimes found in rat poison, according to an official at the family court in Shizuoka, 150 km west of Tokyo.

After the mother was taken to hospital last October, the 17-year-old continued to attempt to poison her tea and took pictures of her in a coma, media reports said.

The mother has not recovered consciousness.

Investigators searching the girl's room after her arrest found animal parts preserved in formaldehyde along with a copy of a book about Graham Young, a British serial killer convicted of poisoning dozens of people in the 1960s and 1970s, newspapers said.

The daughter, a bright chemistry student, idolised Young, reports said.

The girl obtained the thallium from a local drugstore by saying she intended to use it in a school chemistry experiment, media reports said. She also appears to have poisoned herself in an effort to evade suspicion, newspapers said.

''She has switched from denying to admitting her deeds,'' Judge Hiroyuki Anegawa said in a statement reported by Kyodo news agency. ''She is on the threshold of facing up to the seriousness of what she has done, and we can anticipate that corrective education will be effective.'' Reuters SHB VP1012