



A teenage girl who was kidnapped and held captive in a man’s apartment for nearly two years has escaped.

The 15-year-old ran from the Tokyo flat while her captor was shopping and called her family from a payphone on Sunday.

She told detectives she managed to escape because the man forgot to lock the door from the outside when he went out to Akihabara, an area popular with comic book and video game fans.

Her mother reported the phone call to the police, and officers raided the apartment.

A man - 23-year-old Kabu Terauchi - has been held on suspicion of kidnapping.

He was captured on Monday near a forest to the west of Tokyo, and officers say he was bleeding from the neck.

The girl — who cannot be named — disappeared from her hometown of Saitama on the outskirts of the Japanese capital in March 2014.

She was last seen speaking to a man in front of her home, and a note in her handwriting was found in her letterbox saying: “Don’t look for me.”

Police say the girl told them she had spent most of the past two years in Terauchi’s apartment near his university in Chiba.

He moved to Tokyo last month after receiving a job offer and took his captive with him, officers added.

She said she was always locked up in the apartment and closely watched but was not tied up.

Sometimes she was taken outside the apartment but was always accompanied.