NARA, Japan, July 9 (Reuters) – The man arrested for the assassination of Shinzo Abe believed the former Japanese leader was linked to a religious group he blamed for his mother’s financial collapse and had spent months planning the the attack with a homemade weapon, police told local media on Saturday.
Tetsuya Yamagami, an unemployed 41-year-old, was identified by police as the suspect who approached Japan’s longest-serving prime minister from behind and opened fire, an attack that was captured on video and shocked a nation where gun violence is rare.
Gesturing and bespectacled with shaggy hair, the suspect was seen stepping onto the road behind Abe, who was standing on a junction step, before firing two shots from a 40cm (16in) weapon wrapped in black tape. He was detained by police at the scene. Read more
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Yamagami was a loner who did not respond when spoken to, neighbors told Reuters. He believed Abe had promoted a religious group to which his mother had made a “huge donation,” the Kyodo news agency said, citing investigative sources.
He told police that his mother went bankrupt from the donation, the Yomiuri newspaper and other media reported.
“My mother got involved in a religious group and I resented it,” Kyodo and others quoted him as telling police. Nara police declined to comment on details reported by Japanese media about Yamagami’s motive or preparation.
The media did not name the religious group he was reportedly upset with.
Yamagami assembled the weapon from parts bought online, spending months planning the attack, even attending other Abe campaign events, including one a day earlier about 200 km (miles) away, media said.
He considered a bomb attack before choosing a gun, according to public broadcaster NHK.
The suspect told police he made weapons by wrapping steel pipes together with tape, some of them with three, five or six pipes, with parts he bought online, NHK said.
Police found bullet holes in a sign attached to a campaign van near the scene of the shooting and believe they are from Yamagami, police said Saturday. Video footage shows Abe addressing the attacker after the first shot, before collapsing to the ground after the second.
HOSTESS BARS
Yamagami lived on the eighth floor of a small apartment building. The ground floor is full of bars where patrons pay to drink and chat with female hostesses. A karaoke bar goes bankrupt.
The elevator stops at only three floors, a cost-saving design. Yamagami had to go down and up the stairs to his apartment.
One of his neighbors, a 69-year-old woman who lived a floor below him, saw him three days before Abe’s murder.
“I said hello, but he ignored me. He was just looking down at the ground to the side without wearing a mask. He looked nervous,” the woman, who gave only her surname Nakayama, told Reuters. “It was like I was invisible. It looked like something was bothering him.’
She pays 35,000 yen ($260) a month in rent and estimates her neighbors pay about that much.
A Vietnamese woman who lives two doors down from Yamagami, who went by the name Mai, said he seemed to keep to himself. “I saw him a few times. I bowed to him in the elevator, but he didn’t say anything.”
EXPERIENCE WITH NAVAL WEAPONS
A man named Tetsuya Yamagami served in the Maritime Self-Defense Force from 2002 to 2005, a Japanese navy spokesman said, declining to say whether he was the suspected killer as reported by the media.
That Yamagami joined a training unit at Sasebo, a large naval base in the country’s southwest, and was assigned to the destroyer’s gunnery section, the spokesman said. He was later assigned to a training ship in Hiroshima.
“During their service, members of the Self Defense Forces train with live ammunition once a year. They also do weapons damage and maintenance,” a senior naval officer told Reuters.
“But since they’re following orders when they do, it’s hard to believe they’re acquiring enough knowledge to be able to make weapons,” he said. Even the soldiers of the army who have served “for a long time do not know how to make rifles”.
Some time after leaving the navy, Yamagami registered with a staffing company and began working at a factory in Kyoto as a forklift operator in late 2020, the Mainichi newspaper reported.
He had no problems until mid-April, when he skipped work without permission and then told his boss he wanted to quit, the paper said. He used up his leave and finished on May 15th.
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Reporting by Tim Kelly in Nara; Additional reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama in Nara and Nobuhiro Kubo, Chang-Ran Kim and Yukiko Toyoda in Tokyo; Written by David Dolan; Editing by William Mallard
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