- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 November 2009 18.36 GMT
Lindsay Hawker murder suspect Tatsuya Ichihashi (left) and what he is believed to look like after plastic surgery (right). Photograph: Japanese police/AFP/Getty Images
More than two and a half years after he became one of Japan's most wanted suspects, Tatsuya Ichihashi's genius for disguise finally proved to be his undoing. As he waited to board an early evening ferry in Osaka today, a passerby's gaze was drawn to the tall youth wearing a hat, sunglasses and a paper surgical mask.
Hours later, Ichihashi was under arrest for the murder of Lindsay Hawker, a British teacher whose corpse was found buried in a bathtub of sand in his flat in Ishikawa, a suburban town to the east of Tokyo, in March 2007.
Police officers put him on a bullet train bound for the capital, where he will undergo further questioning.
His arrest, moments before he was due to sail to Okinawa, an island in Japan's far south, comes days after it emerged that Ichihashi had attempted to transform his appearance by undergoing extensive plastic surgery and had worked, undetected, as a labourer in the Osaka area for more than a year.
Ichihashi is the only suspect in the murder of Hawker, 22, an English teacher from Brandon, near Coventry, who had been beaten and strangled.
Her father, Bill, 54, welcomed the arrest as "a good day for the Hawkers". He said he would travel to Japan as he "wanted to look Ichihashi in the eyes".
"We wanted justice and we've finally got justice," Hawker said.
He said Ichihashi had shown "no remorse" over the last two and a half years. "This has been a long, hard battle and the battle is over. We have worked tirelessly as a family, we have never given up. I hope the Japanese society give him the maximum punishment available."
Ichihashi's father, a neurosurgeon, said he hoped his son would be brought to justice. "You committed a crime," he said in a message broadcast from his home in central Japan. "You must be brought to justice. I want you to atone for what you did."
His mother had called a daytime television programme and urged her son to give himself up. "It's mum, Tatsuya," she said in an audio message. "Dad and mum have decided to speak about our feelings, although we know you won't like this," she said, before telling him to contact the police.
Tonight, the couple, both wealthy medical professionals, appeared on television to apologise for their son's crime.
When the Hawkers arrived in Tokyo to plead for information on the second anniversary of their daughter's death this year, they appeared to be losing faith in the police investigation.
Despite 8,000 reported sightings and widespread media coverage, officers admitted they were no closer to finding Ichihashi, 30, a former horticulture student who had lived alone in his four-room flat.
Some reports suggested he had been spotted in Kabukicho, a red light district of Tokyo. More recently he was said to have been enjoying the relative anonymity of 24-hour internet cafes in south-western Japan, paying a modest daily fee in return for a cubicle equipped with a sofa and a computer.
In desperation, police increased the reward for information leading to his arrest from 1m yen (£6,600) to 10m yen.
The beginning of the end of Ichihashi's life as a fugitive began last week when police confirmed he had undergone several rounds of cosmetic surgery in an attempt to make him unrecognisable from the face that stared out of tens of thousands of wanted posters across Japan.
He had given false names and addresses at the clinics and failed to return for follow-up appointments, denying police the opportunity to arrest him.
Photographs released by a clinic in Nagoya he visited late last month showed a very different Ichihashi: he was minus two prominent moles on his left cheek, and had been given a thinner bottom lip, a higher bridge on his nose and a double-fold on his eyelids to give him a more western appearance.
The Yomiuri newspaper reported that Ichihashi had visited a clinic in the south-western city of Fukuoka in mid-October, but doctors had rejected his request for surgery to change the shape of his mouth.
The photos begged the question: how could a fugitive who fled penniless from the scene afford plastic surgery? The answer came early today with newspaper reports that Ichihashi had worked for a construction company in Osaka for 13 months, until last month, and saved about 1m yen.
Using the name and address of a dead man from Osaka called Kosuke Inoue, Ichihashi rarely mixed with his colleagues and spent most of his spare time reading comics and watching videos in his room at the company's dormitory.
Nicknamed Lanky because of his height – he is 5ft 11ins – Ichihashi never removed his red cap or black-rimmed glasses in public. When he was persuaded to join a company bowling trip in April, he hid behind a colleague in a group photograph.
"We gossiped that he was an odd guy but I never thought he was the suspect," a former colleague told the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. "It occurs to me now that he was saving the money for cosmetic surgery."
Police found a passport application in his room, leading them to believe he may have planned to flee overseas.
Ichihashi, who had stalked Hawker for several days before her death, followed her home on one occasion to beg her to teach him English, leaving his name and address on a piece of paper – the scrap of evidence that led police to his flat days later.
He evaded nine police officers when he was approached for questioning on the day her body was found, fleeing in bare feet and with no money.
Hours before her death, security cameras captured Hawker giving Ichihashi a private language lesson in a cafe near her home.
One theory is that he lured her to his flat after pretending he had insufficient cash with him to pay for the lesson.
Hawker had been teaching English at a branch of the Nova English conversation school since October 2006, after graduating with a biology degree from Leeds University the same year.