The Manga Murder (Dutch: Mangamoord) is a solved, Belgian murder case possibly involving a serial killer, referred to as the Manga Killer.[1][2] The name of the case was coined by the Belgian media and has to do with the notes that were found near the victim. The notes carried a sentence in capital letters and in different colours,[3] originating from the manga series, Death Note: "Watashi wa Kira desu", a transliteration of "I am Kira" (私はキラです Watashi wa Kira desu).[4][5] Light Yagami, also known as Kira, is the protagonist of the series. In Death Note, Kira goes on a killing spree assisted by his supernatural notebook, trying to cleanse the world of criminals.
The case received much attention from the Japanese media.[1]
On Friday, September 28, 2007, parts of a mutilated corpse, the torso and two thighs, were found in Parc Duden/Dudenpark in Forest, Brussels, by two pedestrians who happened to notice the smell of the rotting parts. A short while later the two notes referring to the Death Note series were found nearby.[4]
The detectives working the case were unable to identify the victim, because all crucial body parts are missing.[3] What they did conclude was:[4][6][7]
The detectives mentioned a practical joke by medicine students as one of the possibilities; the academic year had just started and the students have relatively easy access to dead bodies. Still, the police feared that they were dealing with a serial killer.[6]
A public announcement asking for witnesses received a single reaction. A jogger had seen a blonde man lying down on the same spot where the victim was found two days later. The next day she saw the man again. The witness thought the man was sleeping and did not pay much attention to it. It is not certain that the man was indeed the victim.[9]
The police established cooperation with the working group Corpus, who are involved in the investigation of the Mons serial killer, because there was a similar modus operandi.[3][10]
A month after the event, a new article was published in a Belgian newspaper,[3] stating that the detectives still had not achieved any progress in the case.
As of September 20, 2010: The Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported on Monday that four suspects were arrested in the three-year-old case of body parts found near notes linked to the Death Note manga. The Belgian Federal Police arrested four men on Friday evening — three for murder, and one for "failing to provide assistance to a person in danger" after he allegedly admitted to being at the scene of the crime. According to the Brussels public prosecutor, two of the murder suspects confessed.
At around 6:00 p.m. on September 28, 2007, two hikers found a human torso and two thighs in Duden Park in the city of Saint-Gilles. Police later determined the shaven parts came from a Caucasian male individual who was killed several days earlier and deposited in the park around noon on the day the parts were found.
No identification or personal effects were found on the body parts, but two pieces of paper were found nearby with the same message in Roman capital letters: "WATASHI WA KIRA DESS". (Le Soir posted a police file photograph of the notes.) This is an apparent misspelling of the Japanese phrase "Watashi wa Kira desu", or "I am Kira (Killer)", an alias in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note suspense manga series. Le Soir added that the police also discovered a trail left by the suspects, in the form of a 50-meter (about 160-foot) line of rice that led to a symbol ("probably Japanese") drawn in the vegetation.
While the identities of the suspects and victim have not been made public, the newspaper reported that a spokesperson for the prosecution said that they lived together. The spokesperson said that an argument had broken out between the suspects and the victim, and the victim refused to leave when asked. The argument allegedly turned physical with multiple blows that resulted in the victim's death. According to the newspaper, the spokesperson said that the suspects decided to leave the two notes near the body since they were fans of manga.