Former U.S. Marine admits to strangling woman in Okinawa, Japanese gov't blasts U.S.

A male civilian working for the U.S. military arrested for dumping the corpse of a Japanese woman in her twenties admitted to strangling her, local police officials said Friday, sparking a torrent of fury from the Japanese government towards the United States just one week before U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a visit here to the City of Hiroshima.

Police arrested 32-year-old Kenneth Franklin Shinzato, a former U.S. Marine and resident of Yonabaru Town in the southwestern prefecture on Thursday, following evidence leading them to find he had dumped the dead body of 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro in a forested area in Onna Village on the night of April 28 or in the early hours of the morning thereafter.

Shimabukuro, a company employee working in Uruma city, went missing on April 28 after going for a walk, investigative sources said, with the official filing of her disappearance being made the following day to the police by her boyfriend.

The police said suspicions were raised as she left home without her car or wallet.

The former Marine was subsequently questioned by the police, of his own volition, as he was potentially in the same area as Shimabukuro according to GPS data triangulated from her phone and based on traffic records. He allowed the police to inspect his car.

Following the police questioning and ongoing searches for Shimabukuro, police said they had identified a body as being that of the missing woman and had identified her by both dental and DNA records.

Shinzato, who works at the U.S. Air Force's Kadena Air Base and lives with his wife and child, admitted to the police he dumped the corpse in the wooded area after she stopped moving and that he had in fact strangled her. Police found DNA matching Shimabukuro's in the accused car, investigative sources confirmed.

The latest case follows a U.S. Navy sailor being arrested in March after raping a woman in a hotel in Naha City, the capital of Okinawa.

The sailor, 24-year-old Justin Castellanos, was based at the U.S. Marines' Camp Schwab in the northern part of the island.

The latest murder and previous attacks have led to strong condemnation from the people of Okinawa and has seen instances of growing anti-U.S. sentiment on the island amid a growing spat between the central government and prefectural officials about a Japan and U.S.-sanctioned plan to relocate a controversial U.S. base within the island.

The central government, for its part, has strongly denounced the murder of the Japanese national, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe saying Friday that he will bring up the case with U.S. President Barack Obama, with the issue potentially clouding the Group of Seven leaders' summit to be held in Japan next week, to which Obama will be in attendance and will make a visit to Hiroshima, which will mark the first such visit to the A-bombed city by a sitting U.S. president.

"I feel an extremely strong anger. We want to demand that the U.S. side takes strict measures to thoroughly prevent a recurrence," Abe told a press briefing on the matter Friday.

Abe's top spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, meanwhile, described the crime as "brutal, heinous, abhorrent and unacceptable."

On Thursday evening U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy was summoned to the Foreign Ministry where Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told her to do her utmost to ensure the U.S. cooperates with Japanese officials over the investigation and to guarantee that such an act of utter barbarity never happens again.

Kennedy was quoted as saying she was "deeply sorry on behalf of the American government" adding that the U.S. side would "cooperate fully with the Okinawa police and Japanese government and redouble our efforts to make sure that this never happens again."

Defense Minister Gen Nakatani also blasted the United States, saying he was "outraged at the incident" and said as much to the top U.S. military commander in Japan, Lt. Gen. John Dolan, who was also summoned to the ministry. Dolan also apologized to the Okinawan people.

Okinawa hosts some 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan, yet the tiny sub-tropical island accounts for less than 1 percent of the county's total land mass, with local citizens becoming increasingly irate at their base-hosting burdens and the central government's ongoing pandering to the U.S.'s requests, amid rising instances of crime, noise and pollution connected to the bases.

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been spiking on the island, particularly since 1995, when an elementary schoolgirl was savagely gang-raped by three U.S. servicemen. Endit