Prosecutors in Tokyo embarked on a new attempt yesterday to prove that the serial rapist and killer Joji Obara was responsible for the death of Lucie Blackman, the British bar hostess, a year after he was acquitted in a case that humiliated Japanese police and devastated the dead girl’s family.

At the same time Obara began his appeal against convictions for eight charges of rape and one of unintentional killing, for which he faces life in prison.

The appeal marks the latest stage in one of the most bizarre cases in modern Japanese legal history, which began in July 2000 with the disappearance of the 21-year-old Ms Blackman, a former air stewardess, who was working in the Roppongi area of Tokyo.

More than a hundred detectives worked on the case, 30,000 missing-persons posters were displayed, and Tony Blair raised the case with the Japanese Government during the G8 summit in Japan that year.

But despite repeated appeals for information by her father, Tim Blackman, nothing more was heard of her. Then, in February 2001, her dismembered body was found buried in a seaside cave a few hundred yards from an apartment owned by Obara, a wealthy property heir.

Her head had been embedded in concrete, traces of which were found in his apartment. A police officer who was called there by suspicious neighbours a few days after Ms Blackman’s disappearance described in court Obara’s refusal to allow a search of his property. After his arrest police found scores of videos in Obara’s various properties showing him having sex with drugged and insensible women.

Among them was Carita Ridgway, a young Australian hostess who had died in a Tokyo hospital in 1992 of liver failure. Subsequent investigation established that she died after being poisoned with chloroform, a drug that Obara used to knock out his victims as he raped them. The prosecutors claimed that Ms Blackman died in a similar way. They alleged that he dismembered and disposed of her body using quick-drying concrete and a chainsaw that he bought from hardware shops after her disappearance.

Obara admitted meeting Ms Blackman and spending the evening before her disappearance with her at another of his seaside apartments, but he has always denied having sex with her or causing her death.

Last year he received a life sentence for eight other counts of rape and one of raping and killing Ms Ridgway. But the judge said that evidence relating to Ms Blackman was circumstantial, and he was acquitted of abducting, raping, and unintentionally killing her.

“If the circumstantial evidence is evaluated appropriately and comprehensively, it is certain that the defendant committed the crime,” the Tokyo prosecutors said in a statement presented yesterday. The chief defence lawyer, Mitsuru Kobayashi, said: “We will keep rejecting the prosecutors’ allegations about the killing of Blackman. Regarding the case of Ms Ridgway, we seek an acquittal.”

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