TOKYO - Two Japanese women were arrested Thursday for allegedly hiding the mummified body of an acquaintance in their home for about six months, police said.
The two, identified as Kazuko Ueno, 63, and Teruko Nakashima, 46, were suspected of keeping secret the death of Katsuko Yoshikai to use her body for religious rituals, Fukuoka prefectural (state) police spokesman Hiroshi Kawazu.
If convicted, the two women face up to five years in prison.
The women told police that they recited prayers daily, believing that Yoshikai would return from the dead in six months, Kawazu said. They thought they could preserve the corpse by pricking it with needles, he said. The religion they purportedly believed in wasn't immediately known.
Yoshikai, who was 57, was believed to have died in May but the cause of her death remains unknown, he said.
Kawazu said the women had wrapped the body and stored it in a room in their home in Fukuoka city on the southern island of Kyushu, about 899 kilometers (562 miles) southwest of Tokyo.
Police found the body on Oct. 28, after a man living with the two women reported a "weird odor."