Police get more leads on Ichihashi

OSAKA (Kyodo) The only suspect in the 2007 slaying of a British woman in Chiba Prefecture worked at a construction company in Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture, for 14 months until October under the name Kosuke Inoue, company sources said Monday.

Wanted: A colleague drew glasses and facial hair on a photo of Tatsuya Ichihashi to show how he looked when he worked at a construction company in Osaka. KYODO PHOTO

Police found a fingerprint belonging to 30-year-old fugitive Tatsuya Ichihashi in the company's dormitory where he lived until Oct. 11, investigative sources said.

Ichihashi is officially suspected of dumping the body of Nova English teacher Lindsay Hawker, 22. Her corpse was found buried in a sand-filled bathtub on his balcony.

According to the investigative sources, the construction company called police after the Chiba Prefectural Police released a photo of Ichihashi's surgically altered face, saying he resembled a former employee who called himself Kosuke Inoue.

The name of the company was not released. Ichihashi was hired Aug. 19, 2008, after he asked a company official on a street in Osaka for a job, company executives and other sources said. He said he was 33 years old.

"Please hire me because I need money," Ichihashi, who was only carrying several pairs of socks and underwear in a paper bag, was quoted as saying by the company official. "Please help me."

He started working at the company installing solar power panels for clients and lived in the company's dormitory, company officials said.

On weekends, Ichihashi rarely came out of his dorm room. On one occasion he reluctantly went bowling with his colleagues and at karaoke sang an English-language song. He did not want to have his photograph taken, they said.

Ichihashi's salary was about ¥250,000 a month before taxes, which investigators suspect he was saving to pay for his cosmetic surgery and his life on the lam after leaving the company.

He reportedly told a colleague that he was saving up to send money to his parents.

He disappeared Oct. 11 after telling colleagues he would "come back after a while," company sources said.

He left behind his belongings, including comic books. He received his last pay on Oct. 9.

Investigators found that Ichihashi visited a cosmetic surgery clinic in Nagoya three times after Oct. 23 for counseling, a nose job and a postsurgery checkup.

He paid for the surgery, which cost several hundred thousand yen, in cash.

One of the clinic staff became suspicious after learning the man had undergone a previous operation to remove a mole from his face, a rare procedure for a man. Although he was supposed to return to the clinic, which police were staking out, on Oct. 31 to have the stitches removed, he never showed up.

He flew to Fukuoka at the end of the month, sources said. Chiba police sent investigators to Fukuoka to look for him.

Police also found that a man resembling Ichihashi stayed at an Internet cafe in the city of Fukuoka early this month, sources said.

The man who appeared to be Ichihashi used a member's card at the Internet cafe which appeared to have been registered in the middle of October in Fukuoka.

Because a driver's license or some other form of identification is needed to use the cafe, he apparently had some other form of ID registered under the alias.

The name on the card is the same as the alias he used at the clinic in Nagoya, sources said.

Ichihashi has been on the run since March 26, 2007, when he fled his apartment in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture.

The National Police Agency raised the reward for information leading to his arrest from ¥1 million to ¥10 million in June.