JAPANESE police arrested a 17-year-old boy today on suspicion of murdering his mother after he turned up at a police station carrying a severed human head in a bag.
Police in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima prefecture, 200km north of Tokyo, said they arrested the teenager, a student at a local high school, after officers found a beheaded body in the apartment where he lived.
The boy told police he killed his mother last night while she was asleep, Kyodo news agency said.
The teenager, a student at a local high school, showed up at the police station alone early today, carrying the head in a shopping bag, Kyodo said.
"If it's true, then it is horrendous," the government's top spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said.
The boy had not been attending school recently and was being treated by a psychiatrist, Kyodo said.
He reportedly told investigators: "It would be good if terrorism and war were gone from this world. I didn't care who I killed."
Kyodo said today was the mother's birthday and she would have turned 47.
The boy was living with his younger brother in the apartment, away from their family home, so they could attend schools in the area, and the mother would often visit at weekends and wash their clothes, Kyodo said quoting neighbours.
In 1997, the nation was shocked when a 14-year-old schoolboy was arrested for the murder and beheading of an 11-year-old boy and leaving the boy's head next to a school gate in the western city of Kobe.
While government statistics show that overall juvenile crime and murder by minors - those under 20 - have been on a decline in recent years, a number of sensational crimes has led to calls for harsher punishment against young offenders.
Following the Kobe murder, the age at which youths could be sent to reformatories was lowered to 14 from 16 in 2001, and a Bill to further bring the age down to 12 passed the lower house of parliament last month.
In 2004, an 11-year-old school girl killed a classmate by stabbing her in the neck with a knife, and the year before, a 12-year-old boy murdered a four-year-old by pushing him off the roof of a garage.
- with Reuters
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Map highlighting the Fukushima prefecture. A boy from Aizuwakamatsu, Japan a town just north of Tokyo, walked into the local police station with a sports bag which police say contained the severed head of his mother.

"If it's true, then it is horrendous," said Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, the head spokesman for the Japanese government.

Police say the 17-year-old boy told them that he killed his mother Monday night, and that he acted alone. Police later found the mother's remains inside the boy's apartment. Police say that an object much like a knife was used to sever her head.

There have been a series of murders involving the dismemberment of body parts in Japan in the past few months. A leg severed from an unknown body was found in Tokyo inside a trash bin on Monday. A woman, 32, was arrested in January when she admitted to murdering her husband, dismembering his body, then placed his remains around several spots in Tokyo.