THREE Japanese men and one woman who had contacted each other through a secret internet site committed suicide yesterday in a rented minivan parked along a deserted road.

For the police who arrived on the scene in the northern island of Hokkaido the picture was chillingly familiar. Inside the van, whose windows were sealed, were portable stoves and the ashes of charcoal briquettes: death by carbon monoxide poisoning has become a grim trademark of Japan’s internet suicide pacts. The victims, who have not been named, are believed to have been aged between 16 and 40.

The deaths happened two years after Japan’s first-known such suicide pact, forged in the chatrooms of the country’s “death websites”.

Since February 2003, more than a hundred people in their twenties and thirties have died in more than 40 separate pacts. The chatrooms are monitored by those who run them to guard against intervention by the authorities and religious groups. Japan has long had one of the highest suicide rates of developed countries.

The traffic on the sites clearly shows the desperate loneliness of its writers. Much of it deals with the method of death. The sites’ users express delight at finding a forum to talk about killing themselves without encountering any voices that seek to persuade them to stay alive.

Police who find the victims of suicide pacts have been checking the last numbers dialled on their mobile phones. Often, the last numbers contacted are those of the other pact members, and the phones have not previously been used before that for weeks.

Japanese authorities are especially dismayed by the rising number of teenagers lured into the suicide clubs. Since last October more than half a dozen teenagers have been found. Last month a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old from different areas of Japan killed themselves in a pact, which a parental concern group said could only have been formed in cyberspace.

Ministry of Education figures show that the number of schoolchildren committing suicide rose by 11 per cent last year.

Depression and trouble at home or school are seen as prime reasons, but the growth of suicide discussion boards, and children’s ability to access them from mobile phones, is considered part of the problem.

Yesterday police managed to rescue three people from a flat in Osaka. The three — an unemployed man, a company executive and a female student who lived hundreds of miles apart — had responded to a post on a suicide bulletin board. Minutes into the suicide bid, one of the four alerted police.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Henning Mankell: ‘If Wallander was alive, I wouldn’t be a friend of his’
• Secret society's skull and crossbones for sale
• Nigerian leader vanishes after medical treatment