4TH LD: Obara acquitted over Blackman's death, gets life for 9 other cases

(EDS: UPDATING WITH OBARA APPEALING IN 4TH GRAF)

The Tokyo District Court sentenced Joji Obara to life in prison Tuesday for raping and drugging nine women, one fatally, but acquitted him of all charges involving the death of Briton Lucie Blackman due to lack of evidence.

The court handed Obara, 54, the life sentence -- as sought by the prosecution -- in the cases of five foreign and four Japanese women, of whom Australian Carita Ridgway died and two others were injured.

But the Tokyo businessman was found not guilty of the charges relating to Blackman, who was 21 at the time of her death in 2000, which included raping and fatally drugging her and mutilating and abandoning her body.

Obara has appealed the life sentence to a higher court.

Presiding Judge Tsutomu Tochigi said of the dismembering and abandonment of Blackman's body, ''There is no doubt (Obara) was involved in one way or another, but there is no evidence to link the suspect directly to the crime.''

''But the possibility that the act may have been committed by a third person cannot be denied and the purpose of dismembering (the body) has not been explained, so there remains reasonable doubt in terms of recognizing it as the suspect's crime,'' he said in handing down the ruling.

On the charge of raping Blackman resulting in death, Tochigi said that, unlike with the other victims, there is no video recording of the rape and no evidence to prove that the suspect administered any drugs to her or assaulted her.

Although the judge said there is suspicion that Obara may have been involved in Blackman's death and that there are similarities between her case and the other women's, he said the court cannot determine he raped her based on supposition as long as the cause of her death is unknown.

Regarding the nine other cases, the judge described them as ''abnormal crimes involving unilaterally assaulting victims whose consciousness had been impaired due to drugs.''

According to the ruling, Obara brought the nine women to his condominium in Zushi, Kanagawa Prefecture, between February 1992 and June 2000 and raped them after drugging them using chloroform and other drugs.

Obara pleaded not guilty to the charges against him in all 10 cases in the course of the trial, which lasted about six-and-a-half years.

On Blackman's case, the center of attention in the trial, the indictment said Obara made her drink a beverage laced with a drug before raping her at his condominium in July 2000. She subsequently died, and Obara was accused of dismembering her corpse and abandoning it in a beachside cave nearby.

The dismembered body of Blackman, who worked as a hostess in Tokyo before she went missing in early July 2000 -- about two months after arriving in Japan -- was found in the cave in Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in February 2001.

Obara, who had already been arrested over the cases involving other women, was served a sixth fresh arrest warrant in April 2001 over the case involving Blackman and indicted based on the fact that his mobile phone call records matched Blackman's movements and that he was suspected of committing similar crimes.

In April 2006, Blackman's parents testified in court, calling for the ''maximum penalty'' for Obara.

The prosecutors said in their closing statement that the suspect committed ''bizarre acts unprecedented in the history of sexual crimes.''

Obara's lawyers argued, however, that there is no decisive evidence to implicate him in Blackman's death, saying his DNA was not detected on the woman's body and that the cause of her death has not been determined.

Concerning Ridgway, the defense team said there is no proof that her death was caused by drugs, but Tochigi said she suffered fulminant hepatitis as a result of the use of chloroform and subsequently died.

Ridgway died Feb. 29, 1992, aged 21, at a Tokyo hospital about two weeks after she was drugged and raped by Obara.