On 28 September 2007, two pedestrians discovered parts of a dismembered body — a torso and two thighs — in Parc Duden (Dudenpark) in Forest, a municipality of Brussels, Belgium, after noticing the smell of the decomposing remains. Nearby, investigators found two handwritten notes. Written in capital letters and several colours, the notes carried the phrase "Watashi wa Kira dess" [sic], a mistransliteration of a line meaning "I am Kira" from the Japanese manga series Death Note, in which the character Kira kills criminals using a supernatural notebook. Belgian media named the case the "Manga murder" (Dutch: Mangamoord), and it drew considerable attention from the Japanese press.
Because many body parts were missing, detectives were initially unable to identify the victim. They determined that the remains belonged to a Caucasian person aged between 20 and 30, and that the body was one or two days old when found or had been kept frozen, which could account for the precise cuts. The discovery site lay near the highest point of Brussels. As the straight cuts resembled those in the so-called garbage bag killings attributed to the Mons serial killer, police cooperated with the group Corpus, which was involved in that investigation, and did not rule out that they faced a serial killer; they also considered whether the remains stemmed from a prank by medicine students, who had ready access to bodies as the academic year began. A public appeal for witnesses produced a single response, from a jogger who had seen a blonde man lying at the site days earlier, though it was never confirmed that this was the victim. A month later, Belgian media reported no progress in the case.
By September 2010, four suspects had been arrested and questioned. The victim proved to be a missing person who had been living with several of them, and was identified as Sidi Larbi Ezzoubairi. According to a police spokesperson quoted by the newspaper Le Soir, the suspects had left the Death Note notes near the body because they were fans of the manga. The suspects had met Ezzoubairi in Zeebrugge and killed him on the night of 11–12 September 2007 at an apartment in Schaerbeek, Brussels.
In June 2013, Sidi Mohamed Atir and Abdessamad Azmi were each convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. A third defendant, Zacharia Benaissa, was convicted and sentenced to 23 years. Benaissa absconded after appearing in court for a single day; he was arrested in Gabon on 15 May 2016 and returned to Belgium to serve his sentence at Forest Prison. A case once feared to be the work of a serial killer was thereby resolved.
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