Prosecutors on Friday indicted a 35-year-old woman for allegedly dumping her infant daughter's body last September in a woods in Oita Prefecture.
Oita prosecutors alleged that Yuko Emoto used a minivan around Sept. 13 to take the corpse of her 2-year-old daughter, Kotone, from their home in the town of Hiji to the nearby woods.
Emoto was arrested earlier this month. According to police sources, she has confessed to abandoning her daughter's body but claims she panicked after finding the girl already dead at home and dumped the body in a state mental turmoil.
The prosecutor's office is also having difficulty establishing the cause of death, as the body was in an extreme state of decomposition when it was found five months after Emoto allegedly dumped it, and no witnesses have stepped forward, investigative sources said.
The incident turned into a high-profile case after it emerged that Emoto herself had called the police Sept. 13 to report her daughter's disappearance.
She claimed to have left the girl in a car at a supermarket parking lot in Hiji before entering the store, and that her daughter was gone by the time she finished shopping and returned to the vehicle.