Nicola Furlong died of strangulation, key forensic witness tells Tokyo court

A key witness in the trial against the man accused of killing Nicola Furlong in Tokyo yesterday said postmortems confirmed the Co Wexford student had been strangled.

Dr Kenichi Yoshida, an expert in forensic medicine at the University of Tokyo and a member of the metropolitan medical examiner system, said that autopsy results had left little doubt that “excessive pressure” on the neck of Ms Furlong, 21, had been the cause of her death in a Tokyo hotel last May. Tests had shown that “[Nicola’s death] could not have been the result of natural causes”, said Dr Yoshida.

“In this case there was a very clear cause of death and that was compression of the neck... It is clear that she was killed.”