Crime
Killer of Abe takes out mum’s ordeal on former prime minister
The assassin of former Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, identified as Tetsuya Yamagami has revealed why he killed the 61 year-old, and the reason has to do with his mum.
The unemployed 41-year-old, shot and killed Abe, on Friday, July 8, after stalking the former leader for days, and planning the attack for years.
In videos of the killing shown on social media, he Abe from the rear, and shot twice before police overpowered him.
The gun was home-made, wrapped I black tape, and was cobbled up from pieces boght online.
Yamagami believed Abe had promoted a religious group that his mother went bankrupt donating to, Kyodo news agency said, citing investigative sources.
“My mother got wrapped up in a religious group and I resented it,” Kyodo and other domestic media quoted him as telling police.
He had considered a bomb attack before opting for a gun, according to public broadcaster NHK.
The suspect told police he made guns by wrapping steel pipes together with tape, some of them with three, five or six pipes, with parts he bought online, NHK said.
A neighbour, a 69-year-old woman who lived a floor below the suspect, saw him three days before Abe’s assassination.
“I said hello but he ignored me. He was just looking down at the ground to the side not wearing a mask. He seemed nervous,” the woman, who gave only her surname Nakayama, told Reuters. “It was like I was invisible. He seemed like something was bothering him.”
Reuters also reported how a person named Tetsuya Yamagami served in the Maritime Self-Defence Force from 2002 to 2005, a spokesman for Japan’s navy said, declining to say whether this was the suspected killer, as media have reported.
This Yamagami joined a training unit in Sasebo, a major navy base in the southwest, and was assigned to a destroyer artillery section, the spokesperson said. He was later assigned to a training ship in Hiroshima.
“During their service, members of the Self-Defence Force train with live ammunition once a year. They also do breakdowns and maintenance of guns,” a senior navy officer told Reuters.
“But as they are following orders when they do it, it’s hard to believe they gain enough knowledge to be able make guns,” he said. Even army soldiers who serve “for a long time don’t know how to make guns.