A man in his 40s was arrested Friday (Apr. 14^th) in connection with the murder of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl whose body was found last month near a drainage ditch in Chiba Prefecture northeast of Tokyo, investigative sources said.

The body of a missing Vietnamese girl, 9, was found near the Tone River in Abiko City, the Japanese prefecture of Chiba,on Sunday (Mar. 26^th). (Photo: tokyoreporter.com)

The arrest of the local man concerns the abandonment of her body, not the murder itself. The man’s DNA matched a sample police collected at a crime scene, according to the sources.

Police found the naked body of Le Thi Nhat Linh, a third-grade elementary school pupil living in Matsudo, Chiba, in a grass field in Abiko, also in Chiba, on the morning of March 26^th.

The police suspect Linh’s body was dumped at the spot after she likely died of suffocation. The girl was apparently strangled elsewhere as there were no signs of a struggle in the grass field.

Linh went missing on the morning of March 24^th after she left for school on foot. Her home and school are approximately 600 meters apart.

Linh had been lived with her Vietnamese parents and younger brother in Matsudo since moving from Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, in December 2015./.

According to Japan Today