Nine people were found dead in two cars outside Tokyo yesterday, in what were believed to be the latest in a series of macabre suicide pacts involving charcoal burners that have swept Japan.

Six people, three men and three women mostly aged in their 20s, were found in the morning in a rented minivan parked on a farm road on the scenic peninsula of Miura at the mouth of Tokyo Bay, police said.

Hours later, the bodies of one man and two women, in their 30s and 40s, were found in a rented sedan on the grounds of a villa on a Pacific coast in Higashi Izu, some 100km southwest of Tokyo.

Police found several charcoal burners inside the two vehicles.

In the Miura case, the six dead included a 40-year-old woman, police said.

They had apparently died of carbon monoxide poisoning or an overdose of sleeping pills a day earlier.

"We found four charcoal burners and sleeping pills as well as a number of notes suggesting suicide inside the vehicle," a spokesman for the Misaki police station said.

"It is highly possible that the six people from different domiciles have committed a group suicide," he added.

One of the notes said, "I am tired of living. I am sorry." Another said, "Please spray my ashes around."

The two separate cases appear to be the latest in a string of such group suicides using traditional terracotta charcoal burners in Japan, many of which have involved strangers who met over the Internet to die together.

The charcoal burner is rarely used in modern living in Japan except at traditional-style Japanese or Korean restaurants.

Nearly 50 people have died in similar suicides since early October.

In December, the British Medical Journal warned that the rash of group suicides in Japan was a worrying sign of the Internet's potential for encouraging suicide pacts.

In an editorial in the magazine, London consultant psychiatrist Sundararajan Rajagopal noted that the trend was "in contrast to traditional suicide pacts, in which the victims are people with close relationships."

It could be the start of "a new, disturbing trend in suicide pacts, with more such incidents, involving strangers meeting over the Internet, becoming increasingly common," he said.

Japan has the highest suicide rate in the industrialised world, with 24.1 suicides per 100,000 people each year, according to the UN's World Health Organisation. Suicide rates rose after the economy began to slump in the 1990s. The country registered a record high of 34,427 suicides in 2003.

PHOTO CAPTION

An aerial view shows Japanese police officers investigating the car (C) in which three men and three women were found dead, in Miura, south of Tokyo February 5, 2005. (REUTERS)