Boy takes severed head to Japan police, says killed mom

TOKYO, May 15 (Reuters) A 17-year-old boy turned up at a police station in rural Japan today holding a severed human head and claiming that he had killed his mother, police said.

Police in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima prefecture, 200 km north of Tokyo, said they had begun a murder investigation but declined to say if they had arrested the teenager.

Kyodo news agency said police had found a beheaded body in the apartment where the boy lived.

The teenager, a student at a local high school, showed up at the police station alone early today, carrying the head in a shopping bag, Kyodo added.

''If it's true, then it is horrendous,'' the government's top spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, told reporters.

In 1997, the nation was shocked when a 14-year-old schoolboy was arrested for the murder and beheading of an 11-year-old boy and leaving the boy's head next to a school gate in the western city of Kobe.

While government statistics show that overall juvenile crime and murder by minors those under 20 have been on a decline in recent years, a number of sensational crimes has led to calls for harsher punishment against young offenders.

Following the Kobe murder, the age at which youths could be sent to reformatories was lowered to 14 from 16 in 2001, and a bill to further bring the age down to 12 passed the lower house of parliament last month.

In 2004, an 11-year-old school girl killed a classmate by stabbing her in the neck with a cutter knife, and the year before, a 12-year-old boy murdered a four-year-old by pushing him off the roof of a garage.

REUTERS SZ ND0936