The bodies of seven Japanese killed in a terrorist attack in Bangladesh had few scars, suggesting the victims had little time to resist before being fatally wounded, according to police autopsies conducted on the victims' bodies.
The bodies were flown back to Haneda airport in Tokyo on Tuesday morning, accompanied by the victims' relatives. Police later conducted postmortems on the victims and found that they had died from loss of blood, brain injuries and other causes, investigative sources said.
The bodies bore few scars that suggest hard resistance, the sources said, adding that some of them sustained deep wounds to the neck, indicating they may have died quickly.
In the attack, Bangladeshi authorities said earlier, most of victims were killed execution-style with sharp weapons before the police operation to clear the terrorists was launched at dawn Saturday.
The victims were Makoto Okamura, 32, Yuko Sakai, 42, and Rui Shimodaira, 27, all of whom worked for Tokyo-based construction consultancy Almec Corp.; Hideki Hashimoto, 65, Nobuhiro Kurosaki, 48, and Hiroshi Tanaka, 80, who worked for Tokyo-based consultancy Oriental Consultants Global Co.; and Koyo Ogasawara, 56, an employee of Katahira & Engineers International.
Tamaoki Watanabe, who was among the 13 people rescued when Bangladeshi police stormed the restaurant, returned to Tokyo on a small jet early Tuesday. The sole Japanese survivor of the attack, who is in his 40s, is recovering from a gunshot wound at a hospital in Tokyo.
The police plan to interview Watanabe about the circumstances surrounding the attack.
