Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, appealed to the Japanese media yesterday to give more publicity to the case of Lindsay Hawker, the British teacher, whose strangled body was found in a sand-filled bath.

Two months after Ms Hawker’s suspected killer escaped from nine policemen, Mrs Beckett praised the work of the Japanese police, but asked for more coverage of the case after a meeting with the country’s Foreign Minister, Taro Aso.

“The family would wish us to ask the Japanese news media if you can give a little more coverage to this terribly sad case, in the hope that it will help to bring the perpetrator to justice,” she said.

“I said to the Foreign Minister how much we appreciate the tremendous effort and work that’s been put in by the Japanese police to try to trace someone who may be guilty of the murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker, and to make sure the suspect is brought to proper examination and trial.”

Many would question Mrs Beckett’s words of praise for the Japanese police, one hundred of whom are reported to be hunting Ms Hawker’s suspected murderer, Tatsuya Ichihashi.

Ms Hawker, 22, met the 28-year-old Mr Ichihashi on March 25 for an English lesson in a coffee shop close to his home. They were filmed by security cameras in front of the local railway station and soon after entering Mr Ichihashi’s suburban apartment building.

Ms Hawker’s body was found there next evening by police following up reports that Ms Hawker had missed work and not returned home. Among her effects they found a piece of paper with a telephone number, which they traced to his address. But as they were questioning him, he escaped, in his stockinged feet, under the noses of nine police officers.

Since then television news programmes and newspapers have disseminated photographs of Mr Ichihashi, a former student of horticulture. Police have raided a “love hotel”, where couples rent rooms by the hour, and stopped at least one train on the Tokyo subway after a report of a sighting of the suspect.

The police in Chiba, the prefecture adjacent to metropolitan Tokyo, where the crime occurred, have told British diplomats that they have received 600 items of information from the public. But none has amounted to a credible sighting of Mr Ichihashi. “They’re very keen to catch this man,” a senior diplomat said. “They’re working through everyone they know who had connections with him. There’s no sense that it’s winding down.”

The murder came seven years after the killing in Japan of another young British woman, Lucie Blackman. The former bar hostess had been missing for seven months before her dismembered body was found in a beachside cave near Tokyo.

A Tokyo businessman was cleared of Ms Blackman’s abduction and murder last month but jailed for life for crimes against nine other women.

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