TOKYO - A JAPANESE man who ran a website offering help with suicide has been arrested for allegedly killing a woman who paid him to arrange her death, an official said on Thursday.

Police said 33-year-old Kazunari Saito is accused of giving sleeping pills to Sayaka Nishizawa, 21, and then suffocating her after she gave him 200,000 yen (S$2,497).

Saito, an electrician in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, set up a website designed to be viewed by mobile telephones offering himself for a variety of jobs, including helping people kill themselves.

'I'll do any job there is, legal or illegal. I'll do anything - taking out revenge, drugs, assisting in death,' read one message on the website published by the Asahi Shimbun.

The website could not be accessed on Thursday.

Mr Saito told police he created the website because he needed money to have fun, Jiji Press reported.

Japan in recent years has seen a spate of heavily publicised incidents in which strangers who meet on the Internet make suicide pacts and die together from carbon monoxide poisoning in sealed cars. -- AFP