Girl, 15, rescued after escaping from two-year kidnap hell

Police have caught a 23-year-old man wanted for allegedly abducting a teenage girl who escaped and ran for freedom a day earlier after being held captive in his apartment for nearly two years. Police said Monday that the girl, now aged 15, escaped from suspect Kabu Terauchi’s apartment in downtown Tokyo, Japan on Sunday while he was out shopping and called home from a pay phone. She disappeared two years ago from her hometown in Saitama, near Tokyo. The girl is being assessed by medics but is understood to be in reasonable physical health.

She was always locked up in the apartment and closely watched, but was not tied up or put in chains.

Tokyo police

Saitama police said the unnamed girl, whose name is withheld because she is a minor, told investigators that she escaped when her captor forgot to lock the door from outside when he went out Sunday to go shopping in Akihabara, known as a district for technology and comic book geeks. She called her mother who alerted police. Officers captured Terauchi in the early hours of Monday near a forest west of Tokyo. Police quoted her as saying that she spent most of the past two years in Terauchi’s apartment near his university in Chiba, before moving to Tokyo last month.

Saitama