Japan?s top court confirmed the death penalty yesterday for a man who abducted and murdered four little girls in a series of killings that shocked the nation in the late 1980s, Kyodo news agency said.

Tsutomu Miyazaki, 43, had admitted killing the children, aged between 4 and 7, in and around Tokyo, videotaping his victims? corpses and eating part of one of them. He appealed against the sentence on the grounds that he had been mentally incompetent at the time of the crimes. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal in January, clearing the way for his execution, Kyodo said. Executions in Japan are by hanging.

Miyazaki?s trial opened in 1990. It revealed a life dominated by an obsession with pornographic comics and videos of corpses.

Miyazaki abducted the children from near their homes by enticing them into his car. He tormented the parents of one victim by boxing up the remains of her body along with photographs of the child and delivering them to her home. Miyazaki also sent letters confessing to his crime under an assumed name.

A government survey last year found that just over 80 percent of Japanese voters supported capital punishment.