Seven people were killed and ten others were injured in an attack that shocked the country
Japan has executed this Tuesday the author of the Akihabara massacre, which in 2008 killed seven people and injured ten others in this neighborhood of the capital, Tokyo. The attacker rammed five people with a truck -of which three died-, got out of the vehicle and began to stab passers-by, killing four other people.
As explained by the Japanese Ministry of Justice, the person sentenced for the crime, Tomohiro Kato, 39, was executed by hanging in the same prison where he was imprisoned. He is the second inmate sentenced to death in recent months, after the Justice executed three other prisoners convicted of homicide in December.
According to Japanese authorities, Kato, who was 25 years old at the time of the massacre, made “meticulous preparation” for the attack and showed “strong intent to kill.” Kato carried out the killing on June 8, 2008, telling police that he had gone “to Akihabara to kill people, no matter who he killed.”
Tomohiro Kato, in a file photo of unknown date /
He was arrested at the scene shortly after the attacks, in which he rammed a rented truck into a crowd, before getting out of the vehicle and stabbing random people. “This is a very painful case that had very serious consequences and shocked society,” Justice Minister Yoshihisa Furukawa said Thursday.
The son of a banker, Kato, sentenced to death in 2011, grew up in the northern prefecture of Aomori where he graduated from a first-rate college. He failed his university entrance exams and later studied auto mechanics.
According to prosecutors, his self-esteem plummeted after a woman he chatted with online abruptly stopped emailing him when he sent her a picture of himself. His anger at the general public grew when his comments on a public internet bulletin board, including his plans to carry out the massacre, elicited no reaction.
Repentance
While awaiting trial, Kato wrote to a 56-year-old taxi driver, injured in the massacre, to express his regret. The victims “were enjoying their lives, they had dreams, promising futures, families, lovers, friends and colleagues,” Kato wrote, according to a copy published in the weekly Shukan Asahi. He also said that he was sorry during his court hearing. “Let me take this opportunity to apologize,” he said.
Kato’s execution is the first application of the death penalty in Japan since last December, when three people convicted of murder were executed by hanging on the same day.
Japan and the United States are among the last industrialized and democratic countries to continue to apply capital punishment, a punishment that is widely supported by Japanese public opinion.
The Japanese government believes that it is “inappropriate” to abolish the death penalty, considering that “heinous crimes such as mass murders and murders during armed robberies continue to occur frequently,” the Japanese government’s defense minister said on Tuesday. Justice.
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