The man accused of strangling a British teacher in Japan and burying her body in a bath of soil was arrested yesterday after more than two years on the run.

Tatsuya Ichihashi was caught after being recognised by a passer-by at a ferry terminal in Osaka. He resembled photographs seized from cosmetic clinics where he had undergone surgery to change his appearance.

Mr Ichihashi, 30, had been a fugitive since March 2007, when police arrived at his flat to investigate the disappearance of his English teacher, Lindsay Hawker, 22. After he fled they found her naked body in a bathtub on the balcony.

Her hands and feet were tied with plastic cord and a post-mortem examination showed that she had been brutally beaten.

By escaping and evading capture for so long Mr Ichihashi humiliated the police, whose investigation turned into one of Japan’s biggest.

According to reports in the Japanese media, he earned the money for his plastic surgery as a construction worker in Osaka, where he had lived in a small room in a company dormitory. He used the name and address of Kosuke Inoue, a dead man who had lived in the area.

Fellow workers described him as a quiet and hardworking man who spent his time reading comics and watching videos and who mixed little with them. He wore a red cap and glasses and had a goatee beard.

His colleagues nicknamed him “Dai-chan”, or “Lanky”, because of his height of 5ft 9in. When they persuaded him to go bowling in April he hid behind a colleague when the group posed for a photograph.

“We gossiped that he was an odd guy, but I never thought that he was the suspect,” a former colleague said. “It strikes me now that he was saving the money for cosmetic surgery.”

Police believe that he saved 1 million yen (£6,650), which he carried around in cash. He disappeared after taking his last monthly pay packet of Y100,000 on October 11, shortly before he started visiting cosmetic clinics in Fukuoka and Nagoya.

On October 13 he went to a clinic in Fukuoka and requested surgery to alter the shape of his mouth. He was turned down because his face showed signs of previous operations to thin his lower lip. He also appeared to have had surgery on his eyelids and had two distinctive moles, which had been highlighted on wanted posters, removed from his right cheek.

Ten days later he went to another clinic in Nagoya, where he had an operation to raise the bridge of his nose. He paid in cash and told staff at the clinic that he was staying at local “love hotels”, where couples rent rooms by the hour.

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