A 19-year-old youth was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for strangling a woman and her 11-month-old daughter in Hikari, Yamaguchi Prefecture, last April.
The Yamaguchi District Court handed down the sentence to the defendant, who was 18 on April 14 when he entered the house of Yayoi Motomura, 23, to rape her and killed her when she resisted.
He later strangled her baby daughter, Yuka, with a cord, hid the two bodies in a closet and stole the woman's purse.
His name has been withheld because he is a minor.