Man kept corpse in cupboard to steal pension

Japanese police are investigating a man they believe hid the corpse of his father in a cupboard in order to keep receiving his pension cheques.

The man, 55, told police he came home to find his father dead in bed at their home in Kyoto five years ago.

"I left him there for a week, but he started to smell, so I put him in the wardrobe," the man told police according to the Mainichi Daily News.

The alarm was raised by the man's ex-wife, who visited his apartment and could find no sign of her former father-in-law.

Police found the mummified remains of the older man, who would have been 92 if he had lived, in a wardrobe.

Japanese authorities are trying to identify how many of its citizens recorded as being aged over 85 are actually still alive, after a national audit of the population in 2010.

In September last year, the audit revealed there were 230,000 people in Japan listed as being aged over 100 but unaccounted for, some of whom would be 150 if still alive.

It is believed many families are defrauding the pension system, allowing their elders' deaths to go unreported in order to steal their pensions.

Suspicions were raised in 2010 when officials went to visit Sogan Kato, believed to be the country's oldest man at 111, to mark his birthday, only to find he had been dead for 30 years and his body abandoned in his home.

Some of the £70,000 in pension payments Kato had received since 2004 had been withdrawn.