A game console helps a kidnapped Japanese schoolgirl escape

The girl was kidnapped by a 44-year-old man, whom she met through social networks. He took the girl’s phone and locked it in his own house. However, she managed to figure out how to get help. The girl used a game console that was in the apartment to connect to the Internet and send an email to the police with the text “I’m being held, I can’t escape.”.

As reported by esuteru and nhk:

It’s now known that on July 4, the girl made her way to Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, where she met up with Hiroyasu Goto, a 44-year-old man she’d become acquainted with through social media. From there, the two went back to Goto’s condominium in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. Unsupervised meetings between schoolgirls and men twice their age who live two prefectures away don’t tend to end up as the most wholesome encounters, and sure enough, at some point after arriving at Goto’s place he took the girl’s phone away from her and imprisoned her in his home.

Fortunately, even without her phone the girl managed to figure out a way to call for help. On the evening of July 5, just over one month after the two met up, the girl used a video game console that Goto had in the condo to connect to the Internet and contact the online emergency help desk of the Saitama prefectural police, sending an email saying “I am being restrained and cannot run away.” Through subsequent messaging with the help desk the police were able to determine where the girl was being held and officers were dispatched to Goto’s condominium. Upon their arrival, they found the girl tied up with metallic wire rope bound to a pipe that was part of the condominium’s interior.

The girl, who had no visible injuries, was taken into custody, and Goto was placed under arrest, saying “There is no mistake that I imprisoned her.” Investigators are currently trying to determine the exact chain of events by which the girl met Goto, agreed to meet with him, and ended up at his home.