Tokyo Man Gets Life Term For 2022 Assassination Of Ex-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe | World News

Tetsuya Yamagami, 45, who shot and killed Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, with a homemade gun at a 2022 campaign rally, was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday.

The Nara District Court found Yamagami, who confessed to carrying out the assassination during Abe’s public election speech in the western city of Nara on July 8, 2022, guilty of murder. Abe was shot while addressing voters outside a train station in broad daylight, and Yamagami was arrested at the scene.

Yamagami used a homemade firearm he had collected in his home to kill the former prime minister; It was a crime that sent shockwaves through Japan, a country known for having some of the world’s strictest gun control laws and extremely low rates of gun violence.

During the hearing, Yamagami’s lawyers requested a prison sentence of no more than 20 years, arguing that he was the victim of “religious abuse.” The court heard that Yamagami harbored resentment towards the Unification Church after her mother, a member of the sect, donated her late father’s life insurance payment and other family assets totaling about 100 million yen (about S$828,750) to the church, abandoning the family financially. According to local media reports, it was devastated.

The murder also led to re-examination of alleged links between Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Unification Church. Yamagami claimed he targeted Abe because he believed the former leader was affiliated with the South Korean-based religious group, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which rose to prominence in the late 1950s and became a global organization in the 1980s.

Who Was Shinzo Abe?

Shinzo Abe, who has died aged 67, was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister and is widely regarded as presiding over the country’s last long period of political stability. Born into a prominent political family, Abe began his political career as secretary to his father, former Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1993.

He first served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007, returning to office in 2012 and remaining in power until 2020, when he resigned for health reasons after nearly eight years in office.