TOKYO: Seven people had been confirmed dead as of Tuesday following the torrential rain that hit the northern part of the Kyushu region from the small hours of Monday.

Five of them were found in Fukuoka Prefecture, and the other two in the neighboring Saga Prefecture. Searches for missing people continued in Saga and Oita Prefecture, a Fukuoka neighbor.

In the Fukuoka city of Dazaifu, a man in his 50s was found dead in a flooded underpass Monday night.

A landslide hit two houses Monday morning in the Saga city of Karatsu, leaving a woman in her 70s dead.

On Tuesday, search operations resumed around 7 a.m., involving around 200 people including Saga prefectural police and Self-Defense Forces members.

Around 10:50 a.m., the body of a man was found by a Saga prefectural helicopter near the mouth of the Tamashima River in Karatsu. He was later confirmed to be one of the two people missing in the landslide.

In the Oita city of Nakatsu, police Monday morning received from a relative of a woman in her 50s that the woman was about to be caught in a river current. The woman remained missing, while her car, which she had been driving at the time, was found.

Around 120 people from the prefecture’s police and fire departments searched for her from Tuesday morning mainly in an area along the Yamakuni River where a smartphone believed to be hers was found.

Linear precipitation zones formed in Fukuoka, Saga and Oita one after another, causing localized heavy rain from the early hours of Monday that resulted in landslides and other disasters.

JIJI Press